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Die M&amp;A REVIEW wurde 1990 von Prof. Dr. Günter Müller-Stewens ins Leben gerufen und von 1992 bis 2016 vom Institut für Betriebswirtschaft (IfB) an der Universität St. Gallen betreut. Seit 2016 ist Prof. Dr. Christoph Schalast der Herausgeber. Das Magazin liefert monatlich Fachbeiträge zu Unternehmensübernahmen und Fusionen im deutschsprachigen Raum und international. Sie bietet einen Überblick über aktuelle M&amp;A-Trends, erfolgte Transaktionen und beteiligte Interessengruppen wie Käufer, Verkäufer, Berater und Intermediäre. Die Themen umfassen praxisrelevante Fragestellungen entlang des gesamten M&amp;A-Prozesses, Analysen von Verflechtungsstrukturen einzelner Konzerne und Branchen, statistische Auswertungen, Länderanalysen sowie juristische und steuerrechtliche Beiträge.

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Leo Berthier

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Dr. Mark Thomas is Associate Dean for Programmes at ICN Business School, France. He holds a PhD from Lancaster University, UK and is an alumnus of Harvard Business School. He teaches Corporate Strategy, Strategic Management and Leadership at Master, Executive Education and PhD levels. His research focuses primarily on mergers and acquisitions, strategic growth and change management. He has published more that 40 articles, book chapters and monographs. He has worked extensively with multinationals (including Fortune 500 &amp; CAC 40) as well as small and medium-sized companies particularly in the high tech, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, aviation, and non-profit industries

Dr. Mark Thomas

<h3>1. Musk’s integration approach to Twitter</h3>“The bird is freed” tweeted Elon Musk on October 28th, 2022, with his usual bravado, subsequently implying that the job was finished. He had just completed the long-awaited acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion. How-ever, Musk’s well-documented and self-inflicted difficulties in the weeks following the deal, adequately demonstrated that the task of integration was anything but complete.Musk’s integration style is extreme to say the least. Within days he had issued a series of decrees to drastically change the working culture of the tech firm. Few acquiring companies make radical changes at such a frantic pace. However, Musk’s style highlighted one of the key dilemmas faced by an acquirer, that of the speed of integration. Should the acquirer attempt to integrate as quickly as possible or adopt a more moderate and considered approach to the integration phase?<h3>2. Defining the speed of integration</h3>Choosing the speed of integration is generally recognized as one of the most important decisions that an organization needs to make once the M&amp;A deal has been completed. Integrate too slowly and customers may lose confidence in the firm. This can lead to reduced sales and growth opportunities. Integrate too quickly and knowledge transfer and potential synergies may be lost. Employee confidence in the organization may equally diminish. This can lead to reduced morale and resignations by key employees. Thus, aligning perceptions of integration speed to reality is a key managerial proficiency to ensure efficient post-deal integration. This article offers critical insights into how this challenge should be addressed.Practitioners and consultants tend to strongly advocate rapid post-deal integration. The 100-day rule for post-deal integration has become an “urban myth” (Angwin, 2004, p. 418)1. CEOs involved in M&amp;As have commonly been known to declare that the three things that matter in PMI are “speed, speed and speed” (Chase, 1998, Dec 32). The Boston Consulting Group has maintained that “the ways leading companies manage time represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage” (quoted in Stalk, 1988, p.413). Corporations are often rife with buzzwords and expressions such as “the faster the better” or “time is money”.<h3>3. Nuanced academic view on speed of integration</h3>However, robust academic research offers a more nuanced view. For example, Bauer, King &amp; Matzler’s 2016 study of 116 acquisitions in Central Europe4. They found that only a small proportion of the firms completed the integration process within six months, let alone 100 days. A 2022 paper by Sniazhana Diduc5, looking at the industry of industrial goods and services showed that the two merging companies required 18 months for the first cycle of integration. In practice however, integration between these companies continued years after the official completion of the deal. Similarly, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Roche, has successfully managed several major acquisitions such as Genentech in 2009. Part of their success has been based on a deliberate strategy to integrate at a moderate rather than fast pace (Beraud et al., 20206).<h3>4. Employee perceptions of speed of integration</h3>Part of the difficulty in assessing the correct speed at which to integrate an acquired organisation comes from our general lack of understanding on how different employees perceive the speed of change. In a recently published article in the European Management Journal7, my colleague, Nathalie Louisgrand, and I address this issue. There is a misconception in the world of mergers and acquisitions that employees can accurately judge the speed at which the post-deal integration occurs. Our results showed the opposite. We empirically demonstrate that employees have vastly different perceptions on the time taken for different changes to be implemented.We conducted a two-and-a-half-year, longitudinal study of two merging organizations. During that time, we rigorously tracked how long key integration changes took to make and to implement. We spent more than 60 hours interviewing senior and junior management and analysed several hundred documents. We then assessed the perceptions of different employees for each decision made, particularly regarding the time taken to implement the change. The results are surprising and have significant consequences for how the speed of post-deal integration should be managed.Our analysis of this data demonstrated that employees have great differences in perceptions of the speed of change for the same event. For example, we tracked the reorganization of the IT department. This took nearly 3 months to complete from the conceptualization to implementation of the new structure. Employees who were highly engaged in the process accurately assessed the time taken. However, the more employees were removed from the process, the greater their feeling that the change was implemented with unnecessary haste. One manager suggested that it had all be done within three weeks whilst another employee complained bitterly that the change had been done “on a whim […] in like a week”. They chose to resign from the company shortly thus depriving the organisation of valuable tacit knowledge.<h3>5. Managerial Implications</h3>Our findings offer valuable managerial advice on how staff morale, turnover and change resistance might be more efficiently managed during post-deal integration. For example, much has been written about resistance. However, employees are often categorized into change leaders or resistance leaders. Humans are far more complex than this, and such binary categorizations might hide the real comprehension of their perceptions of change and reactions to it. An employee may simply be asking for more time to absorb the need for change and be more involved in the decision-making process. Consideration for this will improve M&amp;A outcomes, particularly if success is based upon perceptions on the process rather than more objective financial measures. This is the case for mergers in not-for-profit and non-listed companies.<h3>6. Key takeaways</h3>•Reflecting the old adage that ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,’ stakeholder perceptions of the success of the merger may depend on the methods and processes used for integration.•Within these methods and processes, the speed of integration is one of the key decisions that needs to be made by management.•Employee perceptions of speed will vary in accordance with their involvement in the key decisions being made.•Increased employee resistance to the post-deal integration process may be due to lack of understand-ing and lack of involvement in the process.•By including key employees more in the decision making process, the acquiring organization can increase the feeling that the optimal speed of change has been adopted. This will reduce employee resistance to the process. Increased motivation will also enable an acquiring firm to retain its key employees.•Judging the speed of integration is a managerial skill rather than a 100-day dogma.

<hr>1 Angwin, D. (2004). Speed in M&amp;A integration: The first 100 days. European management journal, 22(4), 418-430.www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263237304000635?casa_token=nDzBaWOqrA0AAAAA:CiH9NC16pw9sQTyurqPBrzqRc-tZdb7lNGxRNYFZ3ZyvUVZ_xljAGfKx7i8A7qaBobFjTGIwVac2 Chase, B. (1998, Dec 3), ”National City’s latest mergers put premium on fast execution”, American Banker, Vol. 163, pp. 3-4.3 Stalk, G. (1988). Time--The Next Source of Competitive Advantage.4 Bauer, F., King, D., &amp; Matzler, K. (2016). Speed of acquisition integration: Separating the role of human and task integration. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 32(3), 150-165.www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956522116300185?casa_token=xae53qgiTwUAAAAA:384AtycwoMLXbCiawecEB6TbjFSfPyue_3qRJcc79qZFAoGm8jSGWz6-R8VY-kIHagAxU8cbvf85 Diduc, S. (2022). Integration team members‘ approaches to uncertainty management in M&amp;A. European Management Journal, 40(6), 917-931.www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S02632373220012816 Béraud, M., Drajac, C., &amp; Thomas, M. (2020). Talent management after an acquisition: a case study of Roche and Genentech. Strategic HR Review.www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/SHR-09-2020-0082/full/html7 Thomas, M., &amp; Louisgrand, N. (2022). How does decision-making involvement affect perceptions of speed during post-merger integration? European Management Journal.www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263237322001426?casa_token=-g-kSk-SCOsAAAAA:QqMyWGZViirnp5jtk7eAE5nwVx-jDLgKY2nXKkolSISv7T3ejDMyA_KREnqOd1iRCCZm9qSlH-s

“The bird is freed” tweeted Elon Musk on October 28th, 2022, with his usual bravado, subsequently implying that the job was finished.

Speed after the deal:  Faster and more efficient post-deal integration

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Speed after the deal.  Faster and more efficient post-deal integration through employee involvement in decision making.