When the Danaher Corporation announced in May 2015 that it would split into two separate enterprises in 2016, it seemed at first like a reversal of the company’s history. Danaher had built itself into a remarkably successful business over four decades by acquiring and integrating new companies into a unified whole, improving them through a group of distinctive management practices known as the Danaher Business System (DBS), then holding onto them. Although it’s sometimes compared to a private equity firm, Danaher is different — it buys and builds companies for the long term, not for rapid fix-up and sale. Divesting is not the Danaher modus operandi.
Image: Illustration by John Hersey
