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The Best Books for Private Equity Operating Partners (2026): What Operators Actually Read, and What They Skip

The best books for PE operating partners, grouped by the job each one does, from capital allocation to running the company. Plus the shelf to skip.

Deals

KKR's £5.75 billion DCC takeover passed with three points to spare.

The scheme needed 75% and got 78%. The loudest rebels had already sold to the arbs, and arbs vote yes.

Deals

Advent sold InPost at €16. It is buying it back at €15.60.

Advent floated InPost at €16 in 2021. On Friday 89.81 per cent of shareholders accepted €15.60 from a consortium Advent leads. The business quadrupled. The share price went round in a circle.

Toolkit

The 'Private Equity Practice': 12 Marketing Agencies Now Sell a PE Vertical. Here's What's Actually on the Page (2026)

Fifteen agencies, twelve PE vertical pages, two products under one label, and zero pages that say who owns the ad accounts at the end.

The Overlooked Portfolio-Wide Margin Lever Hiding in Indirect Services

Sponsored by Fine Tune Expense Management By Rich Ham

Deals

Chelsea's owners put in £2.9 billion. The exit values it at £3.7 billion.

Boehly and Walter leave Chelsea at roughly a gilt yield, and the only buyer permitted to pay was the one already holding 61.5%. The record deal of 2022 has become the record price of 2026.

Deals

Brookfield's opening bid for Reliance was the 2018 rights issue price, to the cent.

Four bids, five months, A$4.75. Reliance spent eight years and A$1.22 billion becoming the company Brookfield now buys for the 2018 rights price plus 14%.

Deals

Baldwin's 88% premium is mostly a measure of how far it fell.

Sequence Holdings and Michael Dell's family office are paying $32.50 a share, 20 times adjusted EBITDA, for a broker growing 2% organically. The premium looks big because the fall was bigger.

Views

Private equity has a peculiar habit of paying a premium for a business, then acting offended by how it works.

The founder makes every decision. The systems don’t talk to each other. Pricing is mostly instinct. The finance team closes the month through an act of collective faith. All spotted in diligence. All described as “opportunity”. Then the deal closes and the same things become management failures. Marvellous. We’

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The private equity model is beautifully simple.

When LPs win, GPs get paid. When LPs wait, GPs also get paid. That is either genius or theft with better stationery. The industry is sitting on a giant pile of companies it has not yet sold, distributions are still under pressure, and LPs are being asked to re-up

Views

Spend enough time around PE associates and you will eventually encounter the word JAMBOG.

It normally appears while people are comparing firms, career prospects and the likelihood of ever seeing their carried interest. It is not an official category. Nobody proudly adds it to the fundraising deck. It is an insult. JAMBOG stands for Just Another Middle Market Buyout Group. You will also see

Views

You do not own facilities management. You own operational data.

This is the reframing most sponsors miss. They buy a facilities management company and see cleaners, supervisors, contracts, margins, procurement, labour scheduling, and customer retention. Fine. That is the business on the surface. Underneath, the company is producing thousands of data points every day. Which buildings take longer than priced.