Promoting Quick Decision Making

Avoid negative effects on Integration. Educate the corporate executives about quantity of decisions they need to make. Simple 5-Step tutorial.

Play by

Christian von Bogdandy

Global Lead M&A - Managing Director, Slalom

About the play

This play is designed to get the executives and leaders focused on making cornerstone decisions in a timely manner to avoid delays in integration.

Preparation

Integration can be greatly affected if cornerstone decisions are not made early in the process. Most executives overlook this matter as they haven’t realized the fact that there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.

Things like; are you going to keep the brand of the acquired company? Are you going to keep the facilities? Are you going to end-of-life some products? What products are you keeping? Which people do you want to stay with? Which leaders do you want to keep? These cornerstone decisions need to be made before the deal thesis reaches the IMO.

Use this play to educate the executives about the quantity of decisions that they need to make in the immediate future and the importance of making these decisions early.

People

CEO/Deal sponsor, Corporate Development, Integration Lead, Project Manager

Difficulty

Easy

Materials

Transparency, Creativity

Time

30 min to 1 hour

Running the Play:

Identify the Decision Makers

Knowing your company’s culture, you have to start by identifying the decision-makers in the company that are empowered enough to make the decision. Have a clear list of the decision-makers that can affect your deal.

Sit them down

As soon as the deal thesis goes out and the integration strategy is in place, gather all the Decision makers involved in the deal and sit them down. Ideally, the people involved here would be:

A. Executive Sponsor

B. Project Manager

C. Integration Lead

D. Corporate Development

Ask the right question

‍Ask the executives about the last time they made an important decision, like entering a new market or bundling 3 products together. How long did it take them to finish a decision, from the beginning of the idea to the actual execution.

Revelation

Whatever their answer is, the next step is to reveal that they will need to multiply that decision making by 50, and they need to finish all of it in less than a month. Timelines may vary, depending on your deal, but they will have to finish all the decision making before the announcement of the deal.

Decision Making

‍Now that you have their attention and focus, show them your list of cornerstone decisions. Make sure you cover all the key decisions that need to be made so the integration team doesn’t have to ask again when the deal thesis has been handed over to them.