The Private Equity Edge: How Private Equity Players and the World's Top Companies Build Value and Wealth 1st Edition

Three experienced business leaders and authors share their experiences in VALUE BUILDING from the perspective of top private equity players and the world's best businesses.According to George Schultz former Dean of the University of Chicago, Booth Graduate School of Business and former Secretary of Labor and the Treasury: " Business and Political Leaders ... Read this book and enjoy while learning how the world really works!"

Good read for business owners or managers at any level. A little thick at times but the basic subject matter is pertinent across industries and functional levels.

This book isn't really about the Private Equity Edge -- it offers some simplistic suggestions about how private equity firms create value (dig deeper, move faster) without offering any insights into how to put those high-level concepts into practice. But the REAL point of the book is that the authors believe the US tax system should be revised to encourage small business growth and entrepreneurship.Take a close look at the table of contents:chapter 1: Rules of Thumb are Often Wrong (no real insights here, the chapter title says it all)chapter 2: Wealth, Tax Rates and Income (this has nothing to do with "how private equity players build value"--the chapter is about how tax rates incentivize or disincentivize economic growth)chapter 3: Risk, Life is Not a Straight LineI gave up half-way through Chapter 3 because the text is so repetitive and I had yet to read anything insightful about how private equity firms create value.As an alternative, I strongy recommend Bain's short book "Lessons from Private Equity that any CEO can Use." It was so good that I sent it to some colleagues in the industry.UPDATE: "Inside Private Equity" is also a great alternative read.

I found the Private Equity Edge to be insightful with useful nuggets of wisdom about how to increase the value of a company based on the traits of institutional investors. The book is written from an economics perspective and supports its arguments with a wealth of data. This is a good read for those that desire to look at value creation top-down from a macro view. Nice Job!

This book should have been half the length it was or else they could have expanded on what makes the better Private Equity firms stick out, with more in-depth case studies. Instead they use platitude such as, "Top Value Producers react quicker" and say things such as the Crash of 2008 was caused by Ben Bernanke not considering the monetary levels of the U.S. (these are paraphrases as I couldn't be bothered to look up their exact wording) as well as endless hype of the now completely ignored and rejected "theory" of supply-side economics. I knew with Laffer as the main author (who based on the anecdotes in this book can do no wrong) there would be liberal helpings of his own theories, but this was a bit much. I found myself literally skipping over 5-10 pages at a time. At best, this is a book which will provide you a mediocre understanding of what separates PE firms from public companies.

The main problem of the book is that it presents an obvious fact which is a common sense to everybody (something along the: "You have to dig deeper, be faster than your competitors, do your homework before taking action, companies shouldn't pursue smaller short-term gains at the cost of the bigger long-term ones and so on") and then just keeps repeating the idea for the rest of the chapter supporting it by some anecdotical evidence. The anecdotical examples given in the book are so general that cannot be used as guidance (normally it is in the form of: "This CEO dug dipper, made some crucial changes to the company which as a result brought value to the shareholders"). Moreover the book is full of authors' philosophical discourse on economic and political topics usually not related to the main topic of the book - the private equity edge. More or less the content can be summarized in one sentence: Private companies are more efficient than public, the US should introduce flat tax rate, the Fed is to blame for all the recent recessions because of the poor monetary policy (using the book terms the Fed didn't dig dipper, didn't act faster and didn't do the homework).

Every day reading

I was quite disappointed that 3 such illustrious authors managed to put together such a mediocre tome.The book shows little cohesion between chapters and goes back and forth between anecdotal evidence on success or failure of various businesses with some tenuous links to private equity and high-brow macro-economic chapters whose purpose and positioning is not always clear.It is almost as if each of the 3 authors wrote their own book and then a (not very good) editor wove the 3 (or at least 2) strands together into one book.

I rarely give 1 star, but this book was hard to digest.The positive: It has some clear statements and you get them on the first 25 pages. It has extensive notes at the end of each chapter.The negative:-It is written by a former Reagan economic advisor and you read that in every second sentence. The (extreme) unilateral hurraying of Reagonomics is neither helpful for the topic "Value Creation" nor a proper academic approach.-The text boasts of strong claims but misses any further substantiation that would help the reader to draw further conclusions or learn for his own actions. E.g. you often read "... top value builders are just a bit better at xyz." So. For other claims there is simply no substantiation quoted. E.g. .".. despite the reported high cost, private firms usually save taxpayers millions of dollars compared with government-run alternatives." Maybe that is right... but quote the source of proof!-The case studies provide very little detail and are so little illustrative that you often wonder what the authors wanted to tell. E.g. there is a chapter where the authors revisit the study from the bestseller "From good to great". There are few to none conclusions from the multi-page history of some of the studied companies. A lot of reading, little learning. E.g. a paragraph titled "True believeres in Erer-Increasing Oil Prices Ingore Economics", in the chapter "Inflection points". No mind-opening connection to the topic whatsoever.-The case studies also seem to hurray a very small circle of the always same top managers, that were personally interviewed by the authors. Few general insights.The author may be undoubtedly a great economist of the supply side school of thought.The book Private Equity Edge does not give a lot of greatness to the reader.