John L. Flannery Quotes

Lot of companies are looking for advisory work on business strategy, restructuring work.

I am proud of the fact that the U.K. is an open trading country. I welcome inward investment such as that of Nissan, and the takeover of struggling British companies by foreign companies who turn them around, as in the case of Jaguar Land Rover. I also accept that job losses sometimes have to occur to restore failing companies to health.

When I became CEO, Puma was bankrupt on paper.

If you are only big in China, you are only a local Chinese company.

Even if Pfizer committed itself legally to maintaining some of its research and development in the U.K., its takeover of AstraZeneca would involve dismembering an excellent and strategically important British company.

The apparent strategy of Pfizer is to take over AstraZeneca, dismember it, and put the different parts of it into its three new divisions, with the ultimate aim of selling off one or more.

Telecoms is a national business. There isn't a European market. There's no Telecom Italia in France.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

It used to be said that when the U.S. sneezed, the world caught a cold. The opposite is equally true today.

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

If you erased New York, I hate to say it, if you erased Frankfurt, even London, the world would not have changed.

We are a small, open economy, highly dependent on global flows. It is inevitably a demand that dramatically alters and that is reflected in what we feel here in New Zealand. So there is at its most basic level a limit to what we can do and that is true everywhere.

People used to think that private equity was basically just a compensation scheme, but it is much more about making companies more efficient.

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

Diversification and globalization are the keys to the future.

In 1947 American corporations thought of themselves as national with offices abroad. Today, they see themselves as global corporations with headquarters in the United States.

The consolidation that we started in 2009 was clearly the requirement of that time.

IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: 'We are designing software for the best companies in the world.'

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.

Telco is totally committed to commercial vehicles, where it is bound to remain a major player. What may well happen in the future is we may split the company into two business units.

Every adverse development across the world affects the rest of the world in some way.

Western companies want access to Indian talent. That is why they outsource; that is why they come to India to set up base.

If you look at it ideologically, I would say Brexit is not something that probably is good for the world.