"The M&A Leadership Council has trained and worked with thousands of practitioners across hundreds of deals. Rowland Chen has written a deliberate and practical guide to high-stakes acquisitions, and one I recommend to all members of the M&A community."- Jim Jeffries, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, M&A Leadership Council
In 1984, Texaco acquired Getty Oil for $10.1 billion. Less than two years later, a Texas jury awarded Pennzoil $10.53 billion in damages, finding that Texaco had induced Getty to break a prior agreement to sell. The judgment drove Texaco into bankruptcy. The acquisition failed not because of the price paid, but because Texaco closed without resolving a question that should have been settled before any money moved: was the seller free to sell?60% to 70% of acquisitions destroy value. Yours can be part of the 30% and 40% that create it. Global firms spent $29 trillion on acquisitions over six years, and most of that capital went to waste. Every major consulting firm and business school reports the same brutal numbers. The cause is rarely the price paid. It is misalignment: the moment a leadership team closes a deal without agreeing on what it is actually buying and why.
Agree Early, Agree Often is the executive playbook for the work that decides whether a deal creates value or destroys it. Drawing on more than forty years of practice and over two hundred fifty consulting engagements with Global 1000 firms, Rowland Chen gives senior leaders the frameworks, tools, and discipline to see clearly before a deal closes and to execute an integration that turns an agreement into realized value.
Chen's core argument is that agreement is not a soft skill. It is an operational imperative. Executives who reach alignment early and return to it often execute deals that perform. Those who defer it close deals that disappoint.
Inside the playbook: - Decompose your Deal Thesis before any money moves
- Surface and resolve the assumption gaps that kill acquisitions
- Anchor integration to a clear End-State Vision every stakeholder can see
- Classify acquisitions by complexity and calibrate accordingly
- Build a Human-Machine Deal Team for the modern AI-first M&A environment
Written for the CEO accountable for deal performance, the Chief Strategy Officer building an acquisition program, the Corporate Development executive, the Integration Management Officer managing execution, and the private equity operating partner who needs every portfolio deal to perform on schedule.
"Rowland Chen crafted each sentence well, and almost all have nuggets of practical M&A wisdom. Each chapter is worth its weight in gold."- Jake Chacko, Former Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions, Cisco Systems
About the author: Rowland Chen is the founder of Framework Foundry and has spent more than forty years advising Global 1000 firms on M&A strategy, integration, and business transformation. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and teaches business at De Anza College.
