MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Merger management
you knew people that you bargain with or knew them socially
there was no process of bringing together people -- managers
bringing together the staff, involving people. It was very
nightmarish in some ways in the early days. We were quite
protected from the worst of it because we were still over at
Victoria. We did have to work hard not to develop a fortress
mentality. (Interviewee G)
There was a good deal of comparison by ex-PTC managers between
the way in which the merger that created PCS was handled, compared
with the management processes that were involved in the merger that
created PCS:-
I don't think we handled the merger of PCS very well at all as a
whole and a large part of the reason for that was that we did not
do the kind of things that we did in PTC of getting the managers
together in advance. When we created PTC we had the
Cranfield event, we had a joint weekend at Templeton College
which I think was actually quite fundamental in making the PTC
process quite smooth and H initiated a teamwork training event
for myself and the people that were going to be working with
Hugh in the areas that he had overall responsibility for. All those
things set up a momentum that I think gave as a positive feel
that we were going to make it work. And we got down even to
the staff meeting each other in PTC. They were fairly large and
unwieldy gatherings but at least it enabled you to meet your
colleagues. (Interviewee C)
The Templeton College work was referred to earlier. The Cranfield
event was initiated by IRSF for their managers and seems to have had
a significant impact in enabling managers to look at themselves:-
In IRSF the officers and the majority of the Executive were one
and the same. We went to Cranfield, our officers, before we had
finished as IRSF and we looked our paradigm and we realised
that, gosh, we’ve been flattering ourselves, but we just got on
together. We did do things, in controlling part of the Executive,
that were outrageous and it’s happened here, now, in this
organisation and I see now why it’s outrageous, but we did it
because we were so close. We never really thought about the
issue and there wasn’t a conflict there. (Interviewee H)
IRSF does seem to have handled their side of the PTC merger in a
thoughtful way. Their understanding of how their staff might be feeling
led to an unusual decision:-
We did a good thing which we didn't repeat in PCS because we
were not able to persuade folks to do it; when we merged with
NUCPS every IRSF employee got a minimum of half an hour's
counselling time and that was excellent. Even people who were
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