Good organizations have strong memories. In the spring of 1994, George Roberts engaged the authors as consultants to help his firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., document the histories of its investments in systematic fashion. After some eighteen years in business, KKR was no longer just a small association of investors with a shared body of experience. It was important for the firm's senior partners to transmit both the details and the patterns of nearly two decades of experience to its younger generation of professionals and its widening circle of investors. For us – an economist (George Baker) and an historian (George Smith) – it was an exciting prospect. Though the project was strictly proprietary and intended for internal use, it gave us privileged access to the records and people of one of the modern era's most innovative and influential financial firms. We stood to learn a great deal about the private equity markets, and in particular the leveraged management buyout, a phenomenon that remained largely a mystery outside the rarefied precincts of high finance.

The project involved not just documenting the financial and structural parameters of each transaction KKR had done, but recording the post-transaction operating decisions, management and strategy changes, and operating performances of each of the forty-odd companies KKR acquired between 1976 and 1992. We combined extensive archival research (offering memoranda, SEC filings, internal budgets and memos, annual reports, and the like) with interviews of KKR principals and company executives.