DEALS FROM HELL By Robert F. Bruner Wiley & Sons Pp: 420 Price: Rs 1,348

We've been told so by so many and so often that we now tend to take it as a gospel truth: M&As don't work. Read the popular and academic literature on the subject, and you'll be told that six-or even more-out of every 10 M&A deals end up as failures. Reasons could be anything: The purchaser overpaid, there were little synergies in the merging businesses, cultural differences were too wide...But, usually, by the time the shareholders find out, it is too late. In Deals from Hell, Robert Bruner says it needn't be so. In fact, Bruner, an M&A expert at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, argues that M&As do pay and can be made more valuable. How? "You must have a view about the underlying drivers of M&A profitability to make intelligent guesses," answers Bruner.

One of the first things we need to understand, the Darden professor argues, is that all M&A is local. That is, one must consider the market dynamics specific to a business. "An understanding of these neighbourhoods can help...tilt the odds in favour of an economically successful deal," he says. Based on his study of "neighbourhood maps", Bruner lists circumstances under which M&As are likely to fail. Broadly, the deal will go wrong if you've entered an unrelated business or the economic benefits from it aren't incremental.

But Bruner doesn't stop at saying what works and what doesn't. He gets into the why of it as well. To do that, he considers 2,804 transactions that took place in the US between 1985 and 2000, and based on their performance, categorises them as best and worst. The differences he finds between the best transactions and the worst transactions are rather interesting. For instance, the best transactions start showing material gains within the first 20 days of the deal announcement; for the worst deals, the returns are modestly negative for the first 99 days. Thereafter, things improve rapidly in the case of best deals, while they deteriorate for the worst ones. There are some other learnings: all-cash deals seem to do better than stock-swaps; and deals that are big relative to the size of the buyer tend to perform worse than smaller deals.

Bruner then goes on to look at some real-life disasters (including the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal) to come up with lessons that managers can draw on in combating M&A disasters. But what the readers will likely find more interesting are the 10 case studies that typify deals from hell. Bruner's message to CEOs is simple: Don't do deals for the sake of making up numbers; do deals only if they add intrinsic value to your business. A simple message, but often unheeded in the heat of M&As.

THE APPLE WAY By Jeffrey L. Cruickshank Tata McGraw-Hill Pp: 206 Price: Rs 275

Steve jobs and apple computers have ridden (and are still riding) a rollercoaster. The company is simply fantastic when it rides the crest; but has also floundered on the edge of bankruptcy for a considerable phase of its life. Jeffrey L. Cruickshank's The Apple Way is part history, recording the twists and turns in the affairs of the company and the tempestuous and often discordant relationship between its co-founders-both Steve, one Jobs and the other Wozniak. It is also part history of the evolution of the PC, and later, such iconic products as the iMac and the iPod. It tells how Microsoft licensed the windows and graphic user interface applications from Apple to create Windows 1.0.

There's also a very interesting chapter on how Apple creates a cult by building up real or imaginary Bad Guys, whom it then squares up against. The list of Bad Guys includes IBM, Microsoft and even its own roster of customers.

But this book is not just about corporate history. Cruickshank draws 12 important lessons that management students and aspiring institution builders can learn "from the world's most innovative company". What are they? Read the book to find out.