The New Financial Capitalists: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Creation of Corporate Value [Hardcover]

This book, first published in 1999, gives a balanced, enlightening account of how KKR has approached leveraged buyouts.Based upon interviews with partners of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and on unprecedented access to the firm's records, George Baker and George Smith have written a balanced and enlightening account of how KKR has approached leveraged buyouts. This book focuses on KKR's founding, evolution, and innovations as ways to understand issues in modern American business. In examining KKR as a unique form of enterprise one that subscribes to a set of alternative perspectives on business and value creation the book bridges the gap between public perception and academic knowledge of the leveraged buyout, a crucial phenomenon of modern economic life.Based upon interviews with partners of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and on unprecedented access to the firm's records, George Baker and George Smith have written a balanced and enlightening account of how KKR has approached leveraged buyouts. This book focuses on KKR's founding, evolution, and innovations as ways to understand issues in modern American business. In examining KKR as a unique form of enterprise one that subscribes to a set of alternative perspectives on business and value creation the book bridges the gap between public perception and academic knowledge of the leveraged buyout, a crucial phenomenon of modern economic life.A widespread misunderstanding concerning leveraged buyouts (LBOs) is the belief that they accomplish little but the ruin of companies and the loss of employment. How else could it be? Until recently, journalists, including much of the business press, have depicted LBO specialists as generally greedy, if not sinister, forces whose activities compound the dislocations of modern American economic and social life. This kind of criticism reached a crescendo in the press and in Congress at the end of the 1980s, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts found itself in the middle of the controversy. Based onl³®