Colin J. Keefe, shareholder and chair of the Firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Group, was recently interviewed by Lehigh Valley Business. The article, titled “For Leaders, It’s Not Always about the Numbers”, focuses on a recent study regarding the relationship between business executives and intuition in the context of mergers and acquisitions.
The study was published by Jay Liebowitz in collaboration with six other scholars, from New York to Poland. Through their research, they found that business executives consistently rely upon intuition in addition to numbers analytics. Mr. Keefe agreed with the findings, stating that trust is based on intuition, and “[n]o matter how good the numbers you have, if you don’t have a trust with the person on the other side of the table, deals aren’t going through.”
With eleven years of experience, and several as chair of the M&A Group, Mr. Keefe has seen numerous clients turn down higher offers because “something just didn’t feel right” to them. He holds that trust and intuition are the human elements of business, and are needed to balance out the numbers-drive data that can become overwhelming at times. Mr. Keefe is adept at handling such balance in his clients’ projects, with years of experience leading large dollar transactions behind him.
