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

Mergers and acquisitionsguide the integration effort and to develop clear strategies forachieving this. The integration effort needs to be targeted in specificareas rather than be a blanket process, and clear timescales for implementationmust be given.The new structure needs to be put quickly into place, a level at atime, ensuring that customers are well managed throughout. Thenew sales and customer service structure is therefore also apriority. New values and ways of working should also be discussedand identified.4. Communicate the vision. Kotter emphasizes the need to communicateat least 10 times the amount you expect to have to communicate.In addition, all the research about mergers and acquisitions indicatesthat it is impossible to over-communicate. Managers need to becreative with their communication strategies, and remember to workhard at getting the two companies to build relationships at all levels.The vision and accompanying strategies and new behaviours willneed to be communicated in a variety of different ways: formalcommunications, role modelling, recruitment decisions and promotiondecisions. The guiding coalition should be the first to role modelnew behaviours.5. Empower others to act on the vision. The management team nowneed to focus on removing obstacles to change such as structures thatare not working, or cultural issues, or non-integrated systems. At thisstage people are encouraged to experiment with new relationshipsand new ways of doing things.6. Plan for and create short-term wins. Managers should look for andadvertise short-term visible improvements such as joint innovationprojects, or the day-to-day achievements of joint teams. Anythingthat demonstrates progress towards the initial aims of the merger oracquisition is newsworthy. It is important to reward people publiclyfor merger-related improvements.7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change. Topmanagers should make a point of promoting and rewarding thoseable to advocate and work towards the new vision. At this point it isimportant to energize the process of change with new joint projects,new resources, change agents.251