How do you bring together two teams in the case of a merger or acquisition?


1.4k views3 Comments

CIO in Software, 501 - 1,000 employees
We were acquired by Blackberry in February. What we're seeing is some cultural differences as we're sort of meshing the organizations together. We're going to be learning from each other. Blackberry is an organization with a lot more maturity over its business processes. It starts with actually doing a little bit of that, but a little bit of maturity is good because we're usually all about speed and getting stuff done and we're not always looking at what's the most efficient or effective way to get those done.

There are some things we can learn from our acquirer and there are some things they can learn from us because we're moving at high speed, high growth rate, and we are innovative. If they bought us for our intellectual property and our engineering sort of know-how, that innovation engine we've got going on around what our product engineering is doing, then there is a lot that they can learn to keep that going. Then maybe it spreads some of that back into their organization where they may not have the same mojo they had in the past and they want to get it back. I think there are things that we can learn from each other.
1
Director in Finance (non-banking), 10,001+ employees
Several great articles on HBR.org with more authority than I can speak, but generally it is best to try to forge a new combined culture instead of attempting to integrate one team into another's culture.  Find shared values and encourage/reward collaboration and shared progress
CIO & CISO, 501 - 1,000 employees
Depends on business to business and department to department. Especially when it comes to some of the ancillary functions. It can be very quick. And we can integrate those business functions. But when it comes to real core businesses, where we have major revenue at stake, we give it time to see what what it really takes in order to make sure our customer is ready for that kind of transition. That is where the timing of this transition comes into play.
The other challenges included those related to the actual technical stack itself. That is independent of acquisition. Our infrastructure was hosted in that data center and any team that we wanted to add and any new business files we wanted to do, was taking a really long time. And we had to do this during rebranding that was happening at the same time. We had to migrate all of our services over to some cloud native functionality and also host it on the cloud. That was the the major challenge we overcame during the last two years. We rebranded at the same time we were migrating our infrastructure over to the cloud and rewriting our applications to fit into the cloud in a cloud-native architecture.

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