In 2001 I was faced with a choice.

Sit quietly on the sidelines of a corporate collapse while hell was freezing over, find a new job, or attempt a management buyout.

The latter involved some breaking ranks: never a comfortable path, as Gerd Gigerenzer has shown. But in the circumstances, and in Schumpeterian terms, it would seem to have been honest and right to try. In a Chapter 11 auction, you need bidders quickly. They need to come from somewhere. With my colleagues, I decided we were as worthy as any. After all, we had been pretty neat in creating social networks, so we knew how to operate at high levels of productivity without the need for as many staff as most news companies. Remember, we had to operate in Reuters’ backyard — probably the reason we were so resourceful, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

Bear Stearns played a small but disappointing role in this MBO attempt, as investment banker to the wider company sale, appointed by the company’s creditors. Surprisingly, as a thirty-something editor, this was the first management buy-out I’d attempted. So I needed help. I was pointed toward the bankers as I needed to prepare business plans and locate potential investors, but I was also still doing my bit trying to find a corporate buyer in London for the whole firm. As I recall, emails, calls and voicemails to Bear Stearns went unreturned. All I got for my efforts was a solicitation document pdf that I already had, and to which I’d made some contribution as a general manager, in any event.

Where Bear Stearns were too lazy to venture, I had to go find other help. It materialized in the form of London bankers Cazenove, who were systematic and supportive. Time worked against; all sorts of clocks are ticking in these sorts of end game, (although not as quick as must have happened over this past weekend).

It is just possible that, as an internal player, the rules put you at a disadvantage from the get-go. You feel an unwelcome visitor at the poker table — everyone else is expecting you to be clearing out the ashtrays. But I spent enough time at the table to lay down a couple of hands and get the chance to explain a little about the productivity benefits of social networks within the firm to a few of the great and good, who I guess might be grateful now for having had a little of that accumulated knowledge.

And one of the biggest ironies of it all: as we re-modelled our various news business lines to reflect an independent future, our strongest business plan identified that there was an untapped news market in a rapidly growing sector called credit derivatives. And we had the people who knew how to and wanted to cover it.

As we wake up each morning with the scale of the credit crunch appearing ever larger, I’ve wanted for a while, so long as you won’t think me a Jeremiah, to coin that old cliché from the Jaws movie for the sake of our central banker friends, uttered by Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) to Quint (Robert Shaw):-

• “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

And I wonder if, before too long, anyone is gonna get to say:-

• “Smile you son-of-a-bitch.”

Unfortunately, we may all now be in the same small boat.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, it goes something like this. As one YouTube commenter said: the shark still looks fake:-

Welcome to the Knackered Hack. If you're visiting in search of my paleo lunch with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, you'll find it in three parts here. If you enjoy what you see don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, so you don't miss an important update and can more easily forward those salient posts to your friends and business contacts, sign up for my regular email service. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Thanks for visiting!

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