Case Studies & White Papers

Most mergers and acquisitions do not live up to their promised potential. Consensus is not reached, shareholder value often decreases, and integration becomes difficult. But these key steps can be taken to help ensure a successful M&A.

Leaders now hold each other accountable. Their vulnerability has promoted inclusiveness, built trust and showed commitment to employees. Employees are engaged, their ideas are flowing and they’re taking ownership.

Hanes’ approach to developing their leaders is distinct in that their leaders are required to experience LSI three times before moving forward to the next level development program.

The leaders at ERDMAN saw an opportunity for the senior leadership team to set the tone and expectations for the entire company and help drive needed business results. While never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly and ERDMAN has already begun to see the results of the culture journey they embarked on in 2012.

While it’s never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly. With 12 years of experience and the assessment tools that provided quantitative data showing where we are, where we want to go, and how we need to get there – Inclusa’s culture journey seemed attainable.

Members and leaders of Wisconsin-based Johnsonville Sausage have a bold vision to “be the best company on earth.” This requires that the leading national sausage brand be culturally prepared and poised for aggressive innovation on its way to growing and becoming a $1 billion company. An important step was determining whether the company’s Research and Development subculture would foster innovation and growth while supporting their desired culture famously cultivated in the “Johnsonville Way.”

As the largest health system in Illinois, Advocate’s challenge was to increase and stabilize engagement, focus on culture change, and strengthen relations within a high-profile, semi-autonomous unit that struggled with negative team dynamics, unproductive work relations, and entrenched passive-aggressive behavior.

SHAPE saw their customer satisfaction levels increase markedly and financial performance steadily improve as their culture progressively became more constructive.

Marti Wronski, General Counsel and SVP with the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, shares: “Successful transformation happens when the majority of people in the company have aligned beliefs and when proper leadership mindsets fuel consistent action.”

Angie Zeigler, Vice President of Talent Management at Oshkosh, on the importance of syncing leader and manager development with efforts to understand and evolve the overall culture.

Last spring, about 100 of Mayer Brown LLP’s senior associates from around the world arrived in New York City for a senior associate conference. Very quickly, they crash-landed in a frigid, desolate landscape in subarctic Canada in a Subarctic Survival Situation™ developed by Human Synergistics International. Here are five things that we learned from surviving together in the tundra.

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, John Konrads won two individual medals: a bronze and a gold. He claims the bronze resulted from an over-focus on Competitive thinking and the gold from an Achievement motivation. Almost three decades later, he has come to understand how these two thinking styles played out to produce two very different results.

In July of 2003, California-based software firm Business Objects completed a $1.3 billion merger with Canadian company Crystal Decisions. It was a cross-border merger of mid-sized international leaders in the fast-growing business intelligence software realm, requiring the integration of not only competing technologies but also vastly different cultures. Merging the two entities successfully would require a deliberate approach fueled by accurate insights about both companies and their people.