cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Mergers and acquisitionsKeep customers on boardCustomers feel the effects first… They don’t care about your internal problems,and they most certainly aren’t going to pay you to fix them.(Feldmann and Spratt, 1999)‘It’s very easy to be so focused on the deal that customers are forgotten.Early plans for who will control customer relationships after the mergeror acquisition are essential,’ says Carey (2000). Devine (1999) adds weightto this by commenting:Mergers are often highly charged and unpredictable experiences. It is all tooeasy to take your eye off the ball and to forget the very reason for your existence.Ensure that your team concentrates on work deliverables so thateveryone remembers that there is a world outside and that it is still ascompetitive and pressurized as ever. Help everyone to realize that yourcompetitors will be on the lookout for opportunities to exploit any weaknessesarising from the merger. You might find that in the face of an externalthreat, cultural differences shrink in importance.Some of our experiences as consultants contradict the idea that increasedfocus on the customer can help a team to forget cultural differences. Theopposite effect can happen, where teams and individuals from the twooriginal merging companies use customer focus to further accentuatecultural difficulties:• sales people fight over customers and territory;• managers blame each other rather than help each other whenaccounts are lost;• people from company A apologize to customers for the ‘shortcomings’of people from company B rather than back them up.This lesson accentuates the need to tackle cultural issues early, as well asto define clear groundrules for working with customers as one team.239