Change is hard. Enterprise-wide, transformational change is geometrically more complex. While big changes such as Agile, Mergers & Acquisitions and Shared Services may make strategic sense for an organization, there is no doubt they can be time consuming and incredibly challenging.
Your organization’s culture is arguably your greatest strategic asset. Your competitors can potentially match your product or service by creating a marketing strategy as equally as powerful as yours. But, no other organization has your culture. It’s what makes you successful in what you do. So, what happens when your culture and another organization’s culture are supposed to merge into one?
Another “mega-merger” hit the headlines this week when AT&T agreed to purchase Time Warner for a whopping $85.4 billion dollars. If the deal is approved, it will be the largest acquisition of 2016. Whether we’re talking about a massive transformation such as this one, or a smaller scale situation, Mergers and Acquisitions require the bringing together of two cultures. And culture change is not a quick or simple task.
Mergers and acquisitions are international news on a weekly basis. In fact, just this month alone, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced its acquisition of SABMiller in a deal worth over $100 billion dollars. In addition, Dell purchased EMC in a $67 billion dollar deal touted as one of the largest tech mergers ever. Whether we’re talking about multi-billion dollar deals such as these, or smaller ones, there is no doubt mergers mean change is coming for at least one of the organizations affected, and more likely than not... both of them.
