"BLOOMBERG
The hedge fund manager is an open, friendly, talkative guy who makes a lot of companies—MBIA, Target, etc.—miserable
On Tuesday mornings, William Ackman, the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, holds an investment meeting at his office overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. It was at one of these sessions several years ago that Ali Namvar, a senior analyst at his firm, brought up a company that interested his boss. It was called Fortune Brands (FO).
As Namvar described it to Ackman, Fortune Brands was a corporate platypus. At the heart of the Deerfield (Ill.) operation was a spirits division with bourbons such as Jim Beam, Maker's Mark, and Knob Creek. It also had a golf division that sold Titleist putters and drivers. And a "home and security" unit that made Moen faucets and Master Lock padlocks. This combination didn't make sense to Ackman or to anybody else in the room.
Afterward, Ackman read several of the company's annual reports and concluded that this old-fashioned and, more importantly, undervalued conglomerate was a piggy bank in need of a hammer. "We didn't think it was a logical structure," Ackman says. "The question was: When does it makes sense for these to become separate companies?" This was hardly an academic issue. Ackman's hedge fund has $9 billion under management, and he likes to take large positions in companies and agitate, sometimes publicly, for them to adopt his suggestions. He rarely gives up.
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http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_08/b4216054451075.htm
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