The Corporate Chop-Shop
2005 is to be the Year of the Merger. It's been declared such on the front page of the New York Times and who would argue with such a venerable icon as the NYT? Year end 2004 found worn out old Sears and Roebuck marrying tired and careworn K-Mart, the two of them struggling to the alter trying to put the best face on Wal-Mart running off with their businesses. That deal capped 2004, a year that saw IBM pass off their PC business, Sprint gobble up Nextel and Johnson and Johnson . . . well, you know the scene, we've been there before. The last big-hitter year for mega-mergers was 1999 as the bubble was stretched to bursting.
And burst it did. They always do. That's the magic of free enterprise, the escape valve that fosters periodic heads of steam, the sun that melts the wings of Icarus. It's a self-righting system, god bless it, never all that far out of balance. The Business Cycle, a known entity as studied to death as Hemingway in a lit class. Yet here are the Harvard MBA captain…