I, The Merger Verger, am Douglas Yorke, a corporate development executive and former investment banker. I just love the topic of acquisition integration.
Why? Because it’s where the real action is in acquisitions … not in making the deal but in making it work.
As a banker in the ‘80s and ’90s I watched an astonishing number of deals get done (with advice from me and my Master-of-the-Universe buddies) only to see them utterly fail. Many of us had the gall to return to former clients and seek fees for unwinding deals that we advised them to do in the first place. It was just appalling!
So in 2000 I left banking and joined “the client side” to start doing deals from a position where I could actually try to make them create value.
Professional Snapshot
Investment banking at Wertheim & Co. (10 years; it became Schroders → Salomon Bros. → Citi) plus S.G. Warburg and HSBC (another six years between them)
Acquisitions, integration and strategy activities on the corporate side working in the wholesale broker/dealer, medical products, industrial packaging and fine art logistics sectors.
Before all that, Syracuse then Wharton.
On a personal note, I am a long-time collector of maps, antique ones but mostly the kind that the oil companies used to give away. At one time I had several thousand but donated
almost all of them to the Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine. I have also written a book on the subject, entitled “Hitting the Road: the Art of the Oil Company Road Map,” published by Chronicle Books. It is out of print now but used copies occasionally come up for sale on Amazon.
And I ride Pinarello 
