“Every crack that you have in the foundation of your organization will blow wide open during integration..”

Christian  has past operational experience with serial acquirers, such as Cisco and Symantec and is now leading the M&A consulting offerings in the San Francisco Bay area market.

Decision making plays a huge part in the integration success. 

Fast decision making is required when it comes to integration. It causes a lot of friction between the executives and the integration team when cornerstone decisions are not being done in a timely manner. Understand the current process and prepare to make 50 decisions as part of the integration process. 

Build an Agile Governance

There are a lot of Agile working teams that don't have an Agile governance process. You should enable your team to work in an agile fashion by creating an agile environment, rather than controlling them with a waterfall process.

Have a pre-mortem for every deal

While most people envision success during the early stages of a deal, flipping it over can be quite beneficial. It is a very good thought exercise around the risk and the sense of urgency around the deal. Assume that the deal has already failed, and work your way backwards to determine potential risks that can cause the failure. 

Retrospectives with the target company 

Instead of having retrospectives with your integration team, it is also a good idea to have retrospectives with the target company itself. This can bridge the incompatibilities that you may have regarding culture. As Christian said: “Culture doesn't have to be aligned, they don’t have to have the same culture, but you have to figure out whether there are things that don’t work.” Being transparent as possible is critical.