How to Survive a Corporate Merger
Mergers and acquisitions whirl into shape as fast as storms in the South Atlantic. Amid all the uncertainty about whether these combinations will ultimately prove wise or foolhardy, one outcome is sure: A lot of people will lose their jobs. Mergers, including high-profile ones like that of Sears and Kmart in March, have cost 90,000 Americans their jobs through the first half of 2005, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's a rate 37 percent higher than last year's, and still to come are the mergers of Verizon and MCI, Procter & Gamble and Gillette, and Bank of America and MBNA, as well as hundreds of lesser-known pairings.
How do you survive if you are caught in one of those grinding and crushing combinations? What strategies will help you keep your job, your status, your sanity--and perhaps even vault you to a much higher position in the new company? Let's be frank. Your ability to do all of that will be only partly under your control, especially if you are a manager of the subordinate company. Despite the reassuring talk from top management about "a pairing of equals" or whatever, in most cases one company becomes dominant, the other subordinate. If you have the misfortune to be general counsel or head of information technology for the less powerful company, you will probably have to accept a demotion or leave.
But other than bad luck, what can get you thrown out the door? It will not be your lack of brains or talent. It will be a failure to adapt to a radically different culture. "Most people don't fail at their jobs because they don't have the technical skills," says Scott Kingdom, a managing director at executive recruiter KornFerry International. "More than half the battle is fit, culture, and style." Suddenly, the workplace seems tilted on its side. There used to be daily management meetings with clear agendas. Now everybody communicates mostly by free-form E-mail exchanges. The old CEO used to scream when he was displeased. The new CEO just raises his eyebrows. Civilized, but what does it mean?
Failure to understand and accept culture change is such a monumental mistake that it can even jettison a CEO, as the dramatic ouster of Philip Purcell illustrates. Purcell had been CEO of retail brokerage house Dean Witter when it merged with investment bank Morgan Stanley. He became CEO of the combined company. At Dean Witter, Purcell had presided over a culture that permitted him to be remote and autocratic. Morgan Stanley's culture was a collaborative one where the previous CEO kept his door open, walked the corridors, and often modified his decisions according to what he heard from senior executives. Morgan Stanley's rainmakers not only bristled at Purcell's high-handed ways, but some walked out the door. Their departures threatened the firm's revenues. In June, Purcell left.
As a worker below the CEO level, you will almost certainly have to accept the new way of doing business, an out-of-culture experience almost as disorienting as if you had been spirited out of the country and settled in a foreign land.
advertisement
