Agenda Setters 2001: Buying their way to the top?

For Chris Gent, Steve Case and Rupert Murdoch last year, this year read Case, Gent and John Chambers. Murdoch falls out of the running, Chambers moves up from 7 to 3 and Case and Gent change places. So much for business at the speed at light - this is more like business as usual.

True, we see some other interesting characters making a top 10 debut. There are the European content kings in the form of Bertelsmann's Thomas Middelhoff (5) and Vivendi Universal's Jean-Marie Messier (8), and more mobile bigwigs to accompany Gent - Nokia's Jorma Ollila (up from 15 to 4) and NTT DoCoMo's Keiji Tachikawa, in at 6.

And while we're at it, let's not forget two software titans - Bill Gates, back up this year at 7, and his nemesis, Linus Torvalds, up a dozen places to 10.

But Case, Gent and Chambers dominate. Perhaps a more interesting question is whether they will still be sitting pretty when 2002 comes around.

Consider the fact that they all owe their positions today to a firm belief in 'strength through acquisition', a philosophy that works wonders when times are good but can get a little impractical when times, and financial markets, turn bad.

Let's take Chambers first. Between 1991 and 2000, Cisco Systems bought over 70 companies, averaging two a month towards the end of the 90s. Since last autumn, not a single deal has been done. That's partly down to a sensible strategy of consolidation during a lean period but it's also down to the fact that Chambers played the buying game (since 1995 at least) on the back of an ever growing share price.

Taking bright individuals and intellectual property and assimilating them without holding up the company's progress is one of Chambers' great strengths - something his competitors tried, and largely failed, to emulate. (Remember Bay Networks? Just about. Remember Wellfleet and Synoptics? Who?)

Now Chambers must prove he can keep the company moving without getting his chequebook out. He must also work out how to keep his existing employees happy, employees who have stock options that right now aren't likely to realise any significant value.

Steve Case, acquisition-wise, went for The Big One. In any conventional world, Time Warner - an established media powerhouse - would have led a deal with AOL, an important yet commercially young player dabbling on an important yet commercially young platform, the internet. When the reverse happened in January 2000, this very thought crossed a lot of minds but was tempered by the confidence exuded by the collective digerati.

Today, those thoughts are re-emerging with more passion. As with Chambers, Case is finding out that share deals lose their appeal when one's share price drops like a stone. Case is still admired and respected by the Time Warner chiefs but they and shareholders will be looking for results very soon.

Finally, we come to Gent, a man who has embarrassed stalwarts BT, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom at various times over the last two years with his deal making. But are his trail of conquests and licence fee debt now weighing him down? Will he - god forbid - actually have to ditch more assets?

Like Chambers and Case, Gent prefers to be on the other side of the deal. Whether this triumvirate can cope in an era of consolidation will be one of the big stories of the next 12 months.

But you can be sure others outside - or even in - our top 50 would love to have some of their problems.