Often there is as much innovation with the venue as with the menu: There is the chef who took over an established restaurant on the night it wasn't open, and the chef who floated his beer-based recipes to a different bar every week, and the clever
conglomerateur whose space serves as a bakery until lunchtime and then as a nail salon until dark.
The dictionary accepted
conglomerateur ("a person who forms a business conglomerate") and bottom-fish (to make investments from among those stocks, bonds, etc., currently out of favor"), but other popular business terms such as e-tailer, mission-critical, road warrior, and paradigm shift need a longer track record, according to the publisher.
(113) What if Gulf+Western-a leading
conglomerateur of the 1960s--had been prevented from employing conglomerate acquisitions to transform itself into "a conceptually messy agglutination" of disparate operations?
Only a
conglomerateur could afford to do this, and it is no accident that the name of the paper he is trying to force to the wall is The Independent.
It is noteworthy, but unmentioned in this book, that by the end of his administration, in both real and relative terms, Wall Street was valuing the group less richly, thus effectively denying the
conglomerateur the currency with which to complete further acquisitions.
Geneen was the archetypal
conglomerateur. Worried at the outset of his "reign" (his word) that 85 percent of I.T.T.'s activities were outside the United States, mostly in Europe, and were concentrated in telephone systems, he set out to diversify and to bring the American share of sales and profits to 50 percent.
Under this fatuously self-defeating regime, the returns have migrated to large
conglomerateurs and private-equity players who benefit from perfectly legal insider trading in every one of their investments.
At first, market participants latched onto the theory that the
conglomerateurs were selling them: that the violation of the product-category boundaries represented a new category, which merited a high valuation.
Ten years ago, his group already included 113 companies, and one of the most strikingly non-B School aspects of Pinault's approach is the lack of synergy between units--or, apparently, of a strategic design: it might be fair to compare his methods with those of Charles Bluhdorn, James Ling, or other celebrated American
conglomerateurs; according to a former associate, quoted by his biographers, Pinault "acts on instinct, and constructs his strategy afterwards."
In contrast to the two plus two equals five philosophy of the
conglomerateurs, who believed that they were building institutions that would last forever.
This fact also distinguishes the 1980s wave from the older conglomerate mergers, since investment bankers had rarely, if at all, assisted the
conglomerateurs in their raids.(109)