Once the rage of Western capitalism, leveraged buyouts have lost their glamour and much of their respectability. Suggest an LBO today as a healthy way to create value, and polite company outside of Wall Street will assume you are just trying to stimulate lively conversation. Propose it as a means of improving operating performance by restoring strong, constructive relationships among owners, managers, and other corporate stakeholders, and you may be viewed as a refugee of the 1980s, deluded by the decade of greed.
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review.
