Successful Mergers, Acquisitions and Strategic Alliances: How to Bridge Corporate Cultures

Rating:
Summary: Culture is not soft stuff
Review: If they are honest about it, most managers have been accustomed to think of culture as pretty soft stuff, a nuisance to be dispatched as quickly as possible in order to get on with the task at hand, particularly if that task involves the massive efforts required to make merged enterprises function effectively. Even in retrospect, disasters and successes are rarely measured in terms of the exercise of cultural competence. As Gancel, Rodgers and Rauynaud clearly illustrate, cultural factors tend to get hidden inside of personalities, financial and policy decisions well or poorly made. They become confused with the vagaries of the marketplace, and are lost in the process of sizing up the actors as "good guys" and "bad guys."

The future? Successful Mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances parts company with those who see quickly constructing third cultures as the panacea for organizational mergers. Theirs is a much more realistic process of assessing an appropriate level of integration and empowering local resources at the same time. Looking for a one-size-fits-all shared global culture is building a Titanic, in a time when global organizations need a fleet of fast maneuverable units that can understand and move in and out of diverse local situations.

One of the most effective features of the book is that the merger experience with its failings, turn-around, and ultimate success is regularly seen through the eyes and self-talk of an imaginary though very real sounding CEO named Ingo Janssen. Ingo gives the dimension of how the cultural challenge of merger can shake even the toughest of experienced leaders.

"Culture Bridging," the first tool offered in Successful Mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances is well situated midway between the world of cultural detail and the sweep of the grand intercultural theories, exactly what is need to bridge the world of academic research and theory with the infinite number of cultural details found in diverse groups. The authors offer cultural analysis tools that are both realistic and useful.

Sailing into a corporate merger requires the choice of ingenuous skippers on the bridge who know how to navigate cultures as they find them, in organizations, units, individuals, in inhouse and outsourced resources. But skill is not enough, their authority and leadership need legitimacy, as well as a team committed to effectiveness, and a future made present by vision and systemically kept alive by culture building steps.

These three keystones of the authors' model, legitimacy, effectiveness, and future need to be actuated according to each organization's preferential way of behaving. In the core of the book the authors present these preferences and give us concrete examples of managing them. Given the diversity of cultures and subcultures in merging organizations and their parts, effective captain and crew may be called upon to be able to recognize, respond to and utilize the dynamics of all these preferences to make and keep the new enterprise seaworthy.

The second tool is the "Cultural Audit," dealt with in the overview of a single chapter, despite the importance the authors see in it for successful bridging and integration. The technology of the audit is simple, the work tough. Ideally cultural audits should be part of due diligence, but this is often prevented by legal considerations, politics and haste. The audit in fact frequently comes (too) late, a weighty response to trouble rather than the ounce of prevention it could be.

"Merging the tribes" is what the authors call the process of necessary and timely integration that has to take place at the same time as the organization is working hard to maintain and communicate with its external markets and customer base. There is lots of prescription here as well the citing of best practices. While the book stops short of detailed direction, this part serves well to provide the mental ammunition and reminders that an integration team requires to go forward, and ends with an important reminder to celebrate successes.

In times of crisis we tend to fall back on old patterns of behavior. The authors remind us that the stress of merging is precisely when we should not forget what we have learned personally about dealing with ourselves and others, refreshing and building our "personal armory" of skills needed to understand, listen, analyze and pay attention to process.

The final chapters of the book present a code of values and priorities that are needed to make the bridging process succeed, and then a collection of interview excerpts from individual leaders who faced these M&A challenges and survived to tell of them. Less inspirational than insightful, these scraps of conversation reveal doggedly determined individuals who are willing to share advice from the front lines often won only after numerous casualties..

From technical point of view, Successful Mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances is well done, to the point of perhaps looking deceptively simple, particularly at the outset. Highlights break up the text, diagrams are homey but clear. The quotations come from the right people, and, while not elegant epigrams, clearly speak from experience. The bullet point summaries at the end of each chapter are excellent. While not free of jargon, slang and insider references, all in all, the book is written in simple and lucid English that ESL speakers in global organizations will appreciate. In sum, a book that fills a very important niche for the organizational development profession.