Peter D. Goodson

Peter Goodson is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business and a pioneer in the private equity discipline. He was an early stage partner at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), one of the first management buyout firms. CD&R has purchased and transformed performance at over 70 companies worth more than $100 billion over the last 40 years.

Retired from private equity business ownership, Goodson’s teaching includes M&A: Lessons in Value Creation; High Tech M&A: Strategy, Valuation, and Execution; Turnarounds: Effective Leadership in Crisis; Private Equity: Leadership in Creating Value; and Emerging Market Private Equity Value Creation. He has been awarded the Berkeley Haas Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching three times. He researches corporate valuation in business combinations; success indicators in merger and acquisitions; value creation through innovation and operational improvements; attribution of PE value creation; family owned businesses’ factors for success; best practices in governance in emerging markets; activist investors’ value creation; evaluation and negotiation in emerging markets; and creating differentiation value in private equity firms.

Goodson also holds the position of Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD in its Global Private Equity Initiative and the Emerging Market Institute sponsored by the Singaporean Government. He was elected a Senior Fellow of Dartmouth’s Tuck Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship. He has also taught and lectured at INSEAD, Tuck, NYU Stern, Wharton, Columbia and Stanford Business schools.

Before joining CD&R, Goodson was a Managing Director at Kidder, Peabody, where he founded the M&A Group in 1972 at the age of 26. He continues to be one of the foremost experts in seller advantaged exits and has led hundreds of business combination assignments. He is the founder of Goodson & Associates LLC, a boutique consulting firm focused on providing strategic and financial advice on mergers, acquisitions, sales, divestitures and private equity business development. An adventurer with his own capital and endless curiosity, Goodson is presently assisting a number of emerging market private equity firms in developing operational capabilities to improve portfolio performance and investment returns.