One logo, two companies

Every merger or acquisition comes with a plan. The trouble is, the plan is almost always about the systems - the finance platform, the CRM, the organisation chart - and almost never about the culture. 

Two sets of people, each with their own idea of how work gets done, are expected to become one team because something has been signed and consultants have completed their expensive work.

Yet they rarely do. What I see instead is one company on the email signature and two in the building, quietly fighting over whose way of working wins. The old rivalries don't vanish at completion of the paperwork; they simply go underground, where they're far harder to hear and address.

The research reinforces this view. MIT Sloan's analysis of thousands of merger deals found that 46% are eventually undone, taking, on average, a decade to unravel. And a 2024 study of nearly 250 mergers showed that the wider the cultural gap, the more expensive the deal, the less innovation followed and the worse the long-term performance.

I’ve worked with many mergers and can tell you quite categorically, that the transformation has the best chance of success when the culture is addressed first, rather than it being an after-thought. 

It doesn’t mean that the merger will progress without a hitch, but you will have already created the conditions in which people will work - as one new team - to fix the issues together.