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From the deal professionals

How One Approach to M&A Is More Likely to Create Value Than All Others

McKinsey & Company (McKinsey Quarterly) · 2021; part of a two-decade research series · McKinsey Quarterly (freely accessible)

Strategy & readinessOwners deciding between one big swing and a steady series
Why it is on the shelf. McKinsey’s long-running research conclusion: programmatic acquirers, a choreographed series of smaller deals around explicit themes, outperform big-bang and episodic dealmakers with less risk. The consulting-data sibling of this shelf’s Bain and Laamanen entries.

The Institute's reading

Across more than twenty years of global data, McKinsey’s series finds the same ordering: companies running deliberate acquisition programs, many smaller deals, each tied to a stated theme and capability, deliver better shareholder returns than peers betting on occasional large transformations, and with tighter downside. The prescription is thematic discipline: an explicit M&A blueprint tied to strategy, a maintained pipeline, and repeatable integration.

The Institute’s reading: read this alongside Laamanen and Keil, because the two together give the honest sentence: a program of themed, digestible deals beats bold strokes, and a program run too fast or erratically beats nothing at all out of you. For a private company the translation is a written theme, a standing pipeline of five to ten named candidates, and a pace gated by integration capacity rather than by deal flow.

Key propositions

  • Programmatic acquirers outperform big-bang and episodic ones over long horizons, with less variance.
  • The advantage comes from themes, pipelines and repeatable integration, not from deal count itself.

In practice

  • Write the theme before the pipeline and the pipeline before any banker meeting.

Related entries

Mastering the Merger: Four Critical Decisions That Make or Break the Deal (David Harding and Sam Rovit) Performance of Serial Acquirers: Toward an Acquisition Program Perspective (Tomi Laamanen and Thomas Keil) Global M&A Report (Bain & Company)
Read at the source
Acquisition Conciergeorientation · not legal, tax or valuation advice
Happy to dig into it. What would you like to pressure-test from How One Approach to M&A Is More Likely to Create Value Than All Others: one of its propositions, how it applies to your situation, or where it disagrees with the rest of the shelf?