Participating as a senior manager in my first large merger (Prudential/Wachovia), I found this book a helpful guide. It is a bit of a primer, so it will probably not appeal to old M&A hands; however, any MBA can tell you about discounted cash flow analysis, but few CEOs have mastered the art and science of integration, which is the focus of this book.

The glamor is in the deal making: late nights with the lawyers and bankers. But most (most!) mergers fail to yield their expected value because the unglamorous job of integration is largely ignored during the deal and often mishandled afterwards.

Schweiger's theme is that integration is paramount to ultimate success and it must begin at or before valuation and due diligence, and it must be integrally woven into every step and every process.

The book is readable, logically organized and helpful.

As David Schweiger is the first to admit, M&A activity often turns out to be a source of value only to shareholders in the acquired company. In other words, it is much easier to put a value on potential synergies, increased market share and cost-savings than it is to capture any of these items. This book, written with both pragmatic bottom-line sense as well as compassion for the millions of employees affected by M&As each year, offers an extremely practical guide to capturing that elusive value. M&A can be a bad case of the Emperor having no clothes - a strategy based upon benefits that simply won't ever materialise, something the individual memebers of the crowd may be able to see perfectly well but which they would never dare to admit. Here is an alternative to the cynicism that often accompanies M&A; following Schweiger's methodology might just end with the Emperor being more than halfway decent... There is also an excellent guide to personal survival in an uncertain corporate world. Every manager should have a copy.