Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Context and overview; 2. Recasting the role of debt: creative leverage and buyout financing; 3. LBO governance and value creation; 4. When risk becomes real: managing buyouts in distress; 5. KKR as an institutional form: structure, function and character; Conclusion.

Promotional Information

This book, first published in 1999, gives a balanced, enlightening account of how KKR has approached leveraged buyouts.

Reviews

' ... laudatory study of [KKR] by two business-school professors, one an economist by training the other an historian. From its formation in 1976, the firm of Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis and George Roberts grew to control 59 billion dollars of assets in 35 companies in 1989. (At the same time in American, only GM, Ford, Exxon and IBM were bigger.) In getting there, KKR pioneered a new approach to management that was to revolutionise the American economy.' The Economist 'Baker and Smith's work is remarkable well documented, provides a clear explanation of the successes and failures of KKR, and successfully sweats its mythically enormous profits down to size, in proportion to the high risk involved.' Contemporary European History