Leading for Organisational Change

Chapter 6Beginnings

Once Upon a Time

This is a story about a merger. This means that it is a story about business, perhaps a story that might be told, by a different storyteller, in numbers on a spreadsheet – a barrage of forecasts and graphs trending up and right, or in a flowchart as a series of logical steps.

Different books could be written about the detailed strategic rationale for the merger, the benefits it afforded clients, the careful and empowering terms upon which it was negotiated, and the market backdrop against which it took place, but those stories are for others to tell.

The story I want to tell is about human beings – about the great things they can do together, how they think, how they work, what happens under pressure, and what happens when everything changes. I want to talk about the underlying purpose of the firm that was being created, the stories that were being told, and how they all came together: the human aspects, if you will, of merger and integration.

This is a story about endings and beginnings, hard work, sacrifice and growth. It is ‘a man goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’.

It is always compelling to begin a story well. One of my favourite beginnings is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening sentence to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Wow. The way it brings the ending right ...