Tyco International Strategy

Introduction
Tyco International is an American Security Systems Company incorporated in Delaware, with New Jersey operational headquarters in Princeton NJ [1]. It was founded by Arthur J.Rosenburg in 1960. It was initially an investment and holding company. In its initial years, Tyco International was primarily focused on Government research and military experiments in the private sector. In 1964, the company went public and started acquiring companies, one of them being Mule Battery Products to fill the gap in its development and distribution network. By 1968, it acquired 16 companies. In 1964, their stocks were listed in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Tyco, for the better part of 1970’s, engaged in aggressive acquisition of various companies

Under him, the company adopted an aggressive acquisition strategy which resulted in the acquisition of over 1000 companies between 1992 and 2001. Dennis Kozlowski had joined Tyco in 1976, where his job was to fix up some of the floundering acquisitions of the company during that time. He worked his way up through the company and became the CEO in 1992. One of the key achievement of the company under his leadership was the purchase of an under seas fiber-optic cable business from AT&T for $850 million [3].
Mark Swartz started working at Tyco in 1991. He had previously worked for Deloitte & Touché. He later became the Chief Financial Officer in

Later on, hush money was paid to those the company feared would "rat out" Kozlowski. Furthermore, apart from the accounting issues, it was determined that the company’s corporate governance procedures were severely flawed. The company also suffered from poor documentation, inadequate policies and procedure to prevent the misconduct of senior executives that occurred, inadequate procedures for proper corporate authorizations, inadequate approval procedures and documentation.
Apart from all this, there were many ethics issues that had to be dealt with:
1. Unethical Leadership (extensive involvement of Kozlowski and other leaders in unethical and illegal activity brought Tyco down).
2. Unethical Business Practice of Subordinates (Kozlowski made his team of trusted executives who were given financial benefits for doing the dirty work and to keep shut about it).
3. Unethical Auditing Practice (Price water-house Coopers, the auditing firm was responsible for checking the financial reports and failed to catch Kozlowski’s illegal financial transactions).

The