But the chairman of a large midwestern bank put it best when he recently said, "You get big because you're better. You don't get better because you're big." In other words, growth is not enough, and expansion is not enough -- one must survey the offerings of the entity one is merging with, and determine if expansion will produce enough profits to cover the added costs of additional workers and new branches. This is not to say that expansion is always in error -- witness how Disney's and Lucas film's expanding profits have "come not from squeezing down the costs of producing films but from creating films with licensable properties that could generate profits in other media over long periods of time." (Epstein, 2005)...

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