Lessons Learned – Most Common Gap?
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What is the most common gap you’ve encountered in the ‘lessons learned’ phase of an M&A integration? How have you been able to apply the lessons learned to overcame it in future M&As?
I think culture is the most common gap. Too often pre-close attention is only given to hard facts, such as strategic rationale. It’s often that you buy a company for geographic expansion, value chain expansion – horizontal + vertical mergers, and even just to build a strategic portfolio of businesses.. I hhardly ever hear about mergers done because of the great culture the other company has…. Does that make it an easy overlooked element? I’m pretty sure.
I definitely agree that culture is one of the most underestimated topics! I think a cultural due diligence (at least in short form) can already help to understand how people work, make decisions and take ownership – and where these ways work working might clash after the acquisition. Especially when integrating a smaller, fast-moving company into a larger org, you need to be careful not to loose the speed and strengths that made the company attractive in the first place. For future integrations, I’d definitely take this as something to assess much earlier rather than trying to fixit a year later.
Another lesson for me would be communication. It is easy to underestimate how much effort it takes to keep the right stakeholders informed without forgetting someone and keep them involved at the right time. It would be great to hear what you have found partcularly effective in communication to all stakeholders and also the whole project team. Within the IMO, the communication is often focused on the workstream owners who then also communicate to the project teams – but for sure there are good ways for the IMO to be also more in touch with the more operative teams. Any thoughts on this? 🙂
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