Barbarians at the Gate

This study will provide a review of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burroughs and John Helyar. The study will include a brief summary of the principal points made by the authors; a description and discussion of the economic, social/cultural, legal, political, and technological environments affecting RJR Nabisco at the time of the leveraged buyout attempt; and a consideration of the strategic options for RJR Nabisco, along with which option was actually chosen.

From the title of the book, we understand immediately and clearly that the authors of the book feel that greed is the overriding force at work in the story of RJR Nabisco. Indeed, the book is an extension of the title in the sense that the story told by the authors is not a story of business, but a story of money. It is not a story of products, or of technology, or of services (except for the service of making money), but rather it is a story of money itself.

As the authors write on the last page of their book, "The founders of both RJR and Nabisco would have utterly failed to understand what was going on here. It is not so hard, in the mind's eye, to see R.J. Reynolds and Adolphus Green wandering through the carnage of the LBO war. They would turn to one another, occasionally, to ask puzzled questions. Why did these people care so much about what came out of their computers and so little about what came out of their factories? Why were they so intent on breaking up instead of build

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Structure of the Tobacco Industry .... Time, 54-60. Burroughs, B., & Helyar, J. (1990). Barbarians at the gate. New York: Harper & Row. Castleman, M. (1996, May/June). A life in smoke. .... (2638 11 )

The Han Dynasty .... Han capital at Chang-an and so divided the city into 160 wards, giving each its own walls and gate, and with .... The Han would fight or buy off the barbarians. .... (2078 8 )

Mergers & Acquisitions .... Available at: http://www.google.com, Nov. 1, 2000, 1-2. Burrough, B., and Helyar, J. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. New York, 1991. .... (6522 26 )

Life of Tiberius Gracchus .... I am not Tarquin. I am not a barbarian and indeed have risked my life to conquer barbarians and keep them from the gate of Rome. .... (5842 23 )

xclaimed: 'It used to be 'us' versus 'them.' Now, we don't know who's 'us' and who's 'them'" (Wall Street Journal, 1985, p. 54). The greed which prevailed in the environment created a sense of uncertainty throughout the money market, as Winkler and Herman noted in The Wall Street Journal in their article "Takeover Fears Rack Corporate Bonds." In that article, the authors note that the corporate bond market was in a state of near-chaos as investors watched RJR Nabisco's proposed leveraged buyout and, as a result, increasingly chose not to buy investment-grade industrial issues (Wall street Journal, 1988, pp. C1, C21). Clearly, the prevailing atmosphere was composed of a set of expectations which were based in part on the direction of the stock market and the business community as the nation moved into the 1980s, and in part on the encouragement-to-unregulated-greed policies of the Reagan administration as the decade progressed. It was as if the government declared to business (as the line between government and business dissolved), "Go to it, boys. Don't let us hold you back." And such travesties as the RJR Nabisco buyout circus resulted from this permissive environment. The point here is that the environment created in th

Category: Business - B