Mergers: Leadership, Performance and Corporate Health INSEAD Business Press

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How can CEOs and other senior managers define a merger leadership role for themselves that adds significant value to the work of integration teams? While merger catastrophes continue to grab headlines, a small but growing number of companies have learned to avoid the common mistakes and to reliably achieve respectable outcomes for their mergers and acquisitions. These companies have built deep integration capabilities that give them a major head start each time. However, many of the CEOs of these advanced integrators remain dissatisfied. Their mergers may have been successful in the narrow terms of synergy realization and other short-term project goals, but from a wider perspective they were less healthy for their organization than they could have been. Particularly frustrating for many of these CEOs is the fact that they remain unsure what they themselves could do differently the next time. The authors of the present volume have thoroughly researched this critical but widely neglected need. Drawing on their own extensive integration experience, on that of almost thirty executives, on the systematic analysis of 167 mergers, and on cutting edge academic research, they identify five common leadership challenges to be tackled for the achievement of what we call 'corporate health', the most thorough and sustainable test of merger success: 1) Create the new company at the top before the close2) Place the merger communications within the context of the corporate story3) Develop the performance culture needed for the new company4) Become an active champion for crucial external stakeholders5) Identify the need for and undertake integration-critical learning in real time