Word: rjr
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...Fisher joins a growing band of rescue artists of the not-grown-at-home variety. Prominent among them is Louis V. Gerstner, who was recruited in March from the top job at RJR Nabisco to become chairman and CEO of IBM, the once great computer giant that has lost $8.37 billion so far this year. In June a troubled Westinghouse Electric asked Michael H. Jordan, a partner at the New York City investment firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice, to succeed outgoing chairman Paul Lego. Former Union Pacific chairman Michael Walsh replaced James Ketelsen at Tenneco, a Houston-based auto-parts, shipbuilding...
...Huizenga says, he is content to watch. But even those on the sidelines could not help drawing comparisons with the decade of frantic buy-' em-and-bust-'em-up struggles (like the $25 billion 1988 fight for RJR Nabisco) that burdened corporations with excessive debt, ignited newspaper headlines and enriched everyone from corporate raiders to takeover lawyers. "The only criteria were who won or lost and how the companies were split up," says Felix Rohatyn, a senior partner at investment banker Lazard Freres, Paramount's adviser. In that rapacious era, "we wouldn't look at a deal under $1 billion...
...Machines should have brought a long line of eager job seekers. It did not. Instead many chief executives, including Apple Computer's John Sculley and Motorola's George Fisher, went out of their way to avoid being drafted. The Big Blue board eventually settled on Louis Gerstner, chairman of RJR Nabisco, although he has absolutely no computer- industry experience. Gerstner's main qualification is his ability to turn companies around by cutting costs, but he will have his work cut out for him at IBM, which has lost $7.8 billion in the past two years and cut 100,000 jobs...
Johnson's brazen attempt at highway robbery attracted the attention of Henry Kravis, the pixieish juggernaut from KKR, the New York City firm that had written the book on leveraged buyouts. Kravis, who months earlier had met with Johnson and discussed the possibility of taking RJR Nabisco private, was furious at Johnson for his double-dealing. With his cousin, and KKR partner, George Roberts, Kravis submitted a blow-them-out-of-the-water bid of $90 a share...
...Johnson is kind of a super maitre d', a guy who really knows how to work a room," Gelbart explains. But in the book, Burrough and Helyar also portray him as a Machiavellian cutthroat who betrayed numerous colleagues on his way - to the top, a spendthrift who moved the RJR Nabisco headquarters to Atlanta -- callously firing thousands of employees in the process -- in part because he didn't like "bucolic" Winston-Salem, and a derelict CEO who repeatedly misled his shareholders, his employees and his board of directors...