A tip on mergers from Andy Lack, Sony BMG

Getting on with it is one of the keys to successful mergers, procrastination is death, as Lack told the Financial Times last December:

FT: Having crashed the companies together, is there one side of the equation which is executing the integration?

AL: Not to be semantic about this with you, but I think the success in this integration is that we didn’t ‘crash’ the two companies together. We listened. We stayed open to hearing what the companies wanted to try to do together and then we went about doing it. Now they’re good business people here, on both sides of the equation.

They’re not sitting around saying, you know, we’ll give you our view of that six months from now. They – this was a surprise to us – they wanted it to get done fast. They didn’t want their employee bases to be saying well, who’s in charge? What happens next? Well, nobody’s told me whether they are going to put X into place or Y into place, or whether this person will be working. They wanted it to move quickly. And so it found its rhythm that way.

There were no advisory teams that went out and said, well, after investigating and discussing and contemplating and we’ve issued reports and sent them back to the home office and now they‘re going to digest and consider and they told us that beginning of the first quarter of next year they will … all of that. There was no bureaucracy in the process.