Time For A New PE Strategy?

A common scapegoat for many PE titans these days is simply that credit markets have not thawed enough for them to gain the appropriate leverage needed to make return-maximizing deals. The titans also use the following claim to assure investors: "we are in better shape than our competitors with $XX billion AUM." Well, how about thinking about this: why not employ a different strategy for deploying capital? PE executives boast about their abilities to pick out businesses and turn them around with their business acumen. Why not use this business acumen and less leverage to actually get some deals done? Although this would reduce ROIs for these businesses, it would increase some revenues (which would be great for public companies such as BX and FIG). An activist stance may also make some nice gains, although this may call for a change in fund prospectuses. Nonetheless, it may be time for PE titans to find alternative ways to go to work...