Don’t Let Your Corporate Culture Hijack Merger Integration

Some acquirers have a tough time following the fundamental rules for successful integration.  The problem?  Their companies’ cultural DNA is in direct conflict with best practices.

Properly executed, merger integration is an intense, highly specialized management drill.  You need to be fast, focused, and tightly coordinated across functional lines.  But some companies behave like it’s business as usual.  They follow their habitual practices and politics, allowing a slow, siloed, bureaucratic culture to set the pace.  The result is a tortured integration process that puts the deal at risk.

Let me offer some analogies to make the point:

• A merger integration program should be run like a trauma unit rather than like a hospital ward that does elective surgery. 
• It should function more like a SWAT team than a security patrol. 
• The pace, protocols, and personnel ought to have a lot in common with how you run a 2-minute drill when your team is slightly behind and the championship clock is winding down.   

Letting a sludgy culture call the plays for merger integration is like telling your 330-lb. tackle to run deep for a Hail Mary pass.  Not a good move.  Bad casting.  Chances are you’re going to lose the game.

So why do companies make this mistake?

It’s because corporate culture is an overbearing beast, very protective of “the way we do things around here.”  Culture is a bully—intolerant and sometimes ruthless—yet very self-righteous and pleased with itself.  Naturally, this makes it very set in its ways.

Corporate culture is the staunch defender of an organization’s status quo…even when status quo behavior is dead wrong for the company.  So think about it.  Can you really trust your culture to call the shots, or will it violate the ground-rules for successful integration?