The Takeover Game

Brooks is the man who wrote Business Adventures, which is the book Buffett lent Bill Gates and which both of them have called their favourite, and which is now on every reading list in the world. This one came out a few years later and almost nobody mentions it.

It is about the takeover wave of the eighties, the raiders and the poison pills and the greenmail and the junk financing that made all of it possible. Brooks is not cheerleading and he is not moralising either, he is explaining the mechanics of how a company gets taken from the people running it.

Read it next to Barbarians at the Gate and you get the same decade from two heights. Barbarians puts you in the room for one deal. Brooks shows you the machinery that made every deal in that decade possible, and honestly the machinery is the more useful half.