12. BlackRock: Gregory Duggan and Ravi Umarji (MBA 2016) — BSSE Research Paper

Founded in 1988, BlackRock (BLK) has grown from being a provider of fixed income investment products into the preeminent global asset manager that it is today. Unlike its major competitors, BlackRock insisted on being an integrated platform and employed an acquisition strategy that we would call LBM (leverage my business model) to become a one-stop-shop for investment products. It would seem only natural, then, that BlackRock would likely employ a similar LBM-type integration in its recent acquisition of robo-advisory firm FutureAdvisor, but as 2016 MBA graduates Greg Duggan and Ravi Umarji studied this transaction through the lens of the theories of our course, BSSE, they came up with a different recommendation for the management team.