The Merger & Acquisition Leader's Playbook

CHAPTER 17Culture: The Underlying Root Cause of Nearly Every Merger's Success or Failure

The components of the organizational playbook are culture, incentives, leadership, people, and politics. Choose the behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and environment that will make up your new culture. Invite people into the new culture, noting who accepts your invitation in what they say, do, and believe.

Given enough time and money, your competitors can duplicate almost everything you've got working for you. They can hire away some of your best people. They can reverse engineer your processes. They can match your service levels. Even innovation, unless embedded in the culture, can be matched. The only thing they can't duplicate is your culture.¹

Guy bumps into a competitor's star engineer at a trade event:

“Would you come work for us if we gave you $1 million/year?”

“I would.”

“How about $50,000/year?”

“What do you think I am?”

“We've already established that. Now we're negotiating.”

While not everyone is for sale, enough are to make you vulnerable.

Even if you've got things patented, trademarked, or cloaked in multiple layers of secrecy, your competitors can see what you deliver, what you get done, and the core pieces of how you do it. Even if they can't duplicate what you do exactly, they can get close enough to hurt you—or take it to the next level and render your processes ...