The logic is about who captures the value rather than who creates it. If a target is worth more under your ownership because you can do something for it, and it could not obtain that from anyone else, then the advantage is genuinely yours and the price will not compete it away. If instead you are buying to obtain something the target already has, you are bidding against everyone else who wants the same thing, and the seller collects the difference. Martin names being a smarter provider of growth capital as one such contribution.
For a private buyer this converts an abstract worry into a practical test. Before you make an offer, write one sentence describing what this business will be able to do under your ownership that it cannot do today and could not do under any other buyer. If the sentence will not come, the honest reading is that you are paying for something you did not create, which is the mechanism behind nearly every warning elsewhere on this shelf.
Martin wrote in 2016 against a record year for deal values, exceeding the previous peaks of 2007 and 1999, and his framing of that moment is characteristically blunt. The observation that the pattern rhymes with the tops of previous cycles is itself worth remembering when your own sector is busy.
Sits comfortably with Sirower on synergy discipline and with Capron and Shen on searching where your knowledge is real. It cuts against the common roll-up logic of buying for scale alone, which is a getting thesis rather than a giving one, and which the McKinsey programmatic research treats more sympathetically.