David Cooper 
Leadership Risk 
A Guide for Private Equity and Strategic Investors

This book is a practical guide for private equity investors. It
sets out a framework for understanding, assessing and managing the
risks associated with senior management during the due diligence
process of an acquisition. This provides an essential input into
the wider due diligence review and a sound basis for managing the
investment after the deal has been done so as to maximise the
chances of a successful exit.

The book comes at a time of significant growth in the field of
private equity. In the UK over 3 million people (around 18% of all
private sector employees) now work for private equity backed
companies. It is estimated that European funds currently have
somewhere between #200 and #300 billion to invest over the next few
years. In the US, the whole issue of private equity due diligence
is much more advanced but it is still likely that due diligence
will remain a significant issue for private equity investors for
the foreseeable future.

Table of Content

Introduction.

1 The Landscape of Leadership Risk.

2 Overview of the leadership risk MAPPING framework.

3 Planning and Preparation.

4 Deciding what to Assess at an Individual Level.

5 Conducting Assessments at an Individual Level.

6 What to Assess at Team Level.

7 Assessing at a Team Level.

8 What to Assess at an Organisational Level.

9 Conducting Assessment at an Organisational Level.

10 The Review Phase.

11 The Address Phase.

12 Third Party Service Providers and Their Approaches.

About the author

David Cooper is a specialist in the assessment and development of senior executives and supports investors in managing leadership risk. For the first eleven years of his career he worked in the risk advisory group at Arthur Andersen. He then completed a Masters degree in Organisational Psychology at the London School of Economics, where he began to develop the concept of ‘leadership risk’. He went on to become one of the few Chartered Accountants to qualify as a Chartered Psychologist and founded Cooper Limon, a professional advisory business specialising in management due diligence and portfolio review for Private Equity and Strategic investors. Through Cooper Limon and in his role as head of executive assessment at Praesta Partners, an international coaching firm, he has assessed and coached several hundred senior executives and advised some of the world’s leading Private Equity funds. He continues his research into leadership risk and has spoken internationally at both Accounting and Psychology conferences.
David can be contacted at david.cooper@cooperlimon.com