CDO Roundtable: The Strategist's Toolkit

For corporate acquirers the right strategy is critical to M&A success. That’s why such buyers are called “strategics.”

Their strategies are supposed to guide their search for, and valuation of, synergistic targets, an advantage when bidding against “financial” buyers who by definition have no operations to synergize.

There are now dozens of tools and frameworks designed to help CDOs (chief development officers) formulate and execute effective strategy. Which ones might be relevant to a challenge you face now or may in the future?  Which ones have you found useful in the past?

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Join other CDO Roundtable members, moderator Ryan Kuhn and special M&A West guest Professor Tammy Madsen to compare notes on the various ways to think about how to get effective strategy done.

 Ryan is an investment banker based in Menlo Park and specializing in mid-market data and software transactions. He has a Harvard MBA but his academic achievements pale in comparison to Tammy’s. She is the M. Keck Foundation Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business where she was once Associate Dean. She earned a PhD from UCLA (Strategy & Organization, Management) and her subsequent work has been at the intersection of strategy and innovation. She is the co-author of Modern Competitive Strategy (McGraw-Hill, 4^th Edition, 2016). In a prior life she became a test and evaluation engineer for the F14’s weapon control systems after earning a BS in Mechanical Engineering (UC Santa Barbara) and an MS in Systems Management (USC).

As before, we ask those who join our Roundtable to come prepared with questions (you can submit them in advance here), and war stories about the strategic planning approaches you’ve used or would like to find. Member interaction drives Roundtable value.