The Industrialist

The Industrialist

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Buy & Build Strategy
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Integration & Execution
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January 2026

Leadership Is a Constraint, Not a Trait
Buy-and-build strategies rarely fail because leaders are weak—they strain because leadership capacity is finite and complexity grows faster than…
 • David Carr
Why Integration Fails
A reframing of post-merger integration as an organizational absorption and capacity problem—not an execution or PMI problem—explaining why failures…
 • David Carr
Why We Acquire: Motives Before Targets
Before we select targets, we’ve already decided why we’re acquiring — and that decision quietly narrows everything that follows.
 • David Carr
What Buy-and-Build Really Is
Buy-and-build looks simple from the outside. From inside an operating platform, it behaves more like a system under load.
 • David Carr
Green Shoot Perspectives
Exploratory thinking at the boundary between theory and execution. Early signals, tested under real-world constraints. Not doctrine.
 • David Carr
How to Read This Project
The Industrialist isn’t a feed—it’s a structured body of work. This short guide explains how the project is organized and where different readers might…
 • David Carr

December 2025

Thesis Notebook
This section uses theory not to explain Buy-and-Build away—but to see it more clearly.
 • David Carr
Leadership & Operating
In buy-and-build platforms, leadership strain is rarely a talent problem—it’s a system problem shaped by capacity, authority, and cadence.
 • David Carr
Integration & Execution
Integration is where strategy meets the limits of organizational capacity.
 • David Carr
Target Selection & Diligence
Target selection isn’t just about finding good companies — it’s about deciding what kinds of problems the organization is ready to live with next.
 • David Carr
Buy & Build Strategy
Buy-and-build isn’t just a growth strategy — it’s a system whose behavior changes as complexity accumulates.
 • David Carr
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