ABSTRACT
Some takeovers are genuine attempts to create value through mergers; others are simply efforts by raiders to take advantage of low stock prices to loot companies' assets. “Greenmailers” use the threat of a takeover to force worried managers to buy back their shares at inflated values. A takeover battle is sudden, jarring, and the most visible crisis that a top executive is called on to manage. So finely developed is the practice of takeover offer and response, repulse and wooing, that it has become an art form, one of the few areas of crisis management that is well developed. If all others were studied as thoroughly, we would have a fully developed body of knowledge in crisis management today. Unfortunately, takeover defense stands as a model of how far expertise in other areas has to go.
