When a whale swallowed Jonah, it “vomited” him ashore. Yuck. I guess a gangplank wasn’t an option.
Pinoccio and Gepetto, in contrast, exited their whale by way of a sneeze. In the Disney version, at least, the depiction was nowhere near as icky as you’d expect.
In actual oceans, whatever a whale swallows finds itself immersed in hydrochloric acid and digestive juices — a lethal and unpleasant prospect.
When a corporate whale swallows a smaller business, employees of the acquired business often find that experience unpleasant. Not as unpleasant as a whale’s digestive tract, but worse than being the swallower.
If you’re the swallowee, getting through the process while minimizing the misery starts with an unobstructed view of the acquiring company’s … no, stop that! Not its esophagus. Its plans. The big three:
Holding company: The whale bought your employer because it liked its products, services, ability to innovate, customer list, intellectual capital, or some other desirable characteristic.
Whatever the reason, some acquiring companies are careful to, changing zoological metaphors, avoid killing the golden goose.
What you’re in for: Mostly, your now quasi-autonomous business unit will have to pay a tithe to corporate. On top of which, instead of review by a friendly board of directors that’s well-attuned to your company’s business culture for review and approval, major capital proposals will probably go to a corporate executive leadership team that’s far more concerned with cost and risk reduction as outcomes than opportunities to increase revenue, marketshare, and mindshare.
In exchange, your CEO probably gets a seat at the table during the annual strategic planning retreat.
Overall, if you’re being added to a holding company, tomorrow will, for the most part, look a lot like yesterday.
Modified holding company: Large enterprise management culture emphasizes cost reduction above all other forms of business improvement. It’s epoxied in place, from the board of directors to the executive suite, and from there on down.
The companies they acquire are more likely to be entrepreneurial, with an executive team that cares far more about increasing revenue than about reducing costs.
As a consequence, acquiring companies often set “synergy targets” for each acquisition — opportunities to reduce costs by eliminating duplicative business functions.
As it turns out, eliminating many of these is hard. Often, really hard. Even something as seemingly generic as human resources turns out to have nuances that add a lot of complexity … and therefore cost … to the redundancy elimination effort.
But everyone’s names are on the synergy targets. And oh, by the way, your company has to find some way to pay for its corporate tithe, too.
The impact: Everything that can be easily handed off to corporate gets handed off to corporate. It starts with email and the rest of the productivity and collaboration suite. “Non-strategic sourcing” … purchasing and the associated accounts payable … is another likely candidate; so is recruiting.
That the waste is there to be eliminated is a political fact. Your job isn’t to argue that the political fact is operational fiction. You lost that argument the day everyone signed the acquisition documents.
Your job is to find the least painful functions to move to corporate and shine your spotlight on them in the hopes that this will distract everyone from the ones whose movement would do serious damage.
Integrated provider: They’re serious.
The folks who decided to acquire your company, that is. They envision your business as an integral part of a new whole, and they’re willing to invest the funds needed to turn their … sorry, there’s no other word for it … vision into reality.
This is where it becomes painful.
When you work for a smaller firm, some of your identity is wrapped up in your affinity for it. That’s going to go away. So is a lot of how you’re accustomed to getting things done.
That’s what you won’t like. But in exchange, there’s a much better chance that your new employer is run by pros. Integrating an acquisition is much, much harder than slapping one into a holding company. An executive team willing to go through the effort is an executive team worth you giving the benefit of your doubt.
The sooner you get over your sense of loss and start to actively contribute your bits and pieces to making it work, the more likely you are to benefit from the transaction.
I suggest an additional scenario that has become more common these days, where the acquiring company are just corporate raiders who will take the most profitable parts of the company and sell them off, then use the rest of it to shift a bunch of old debt from previous pirate adventures onto, then force it to file for bankruptcy, wiping out the debt.
Unless you work for the profitable parts that are sold off, you are toast. Update your resume.
And as an aside, isn’t it terrific how the bankruptcy laws in America have changed over the last couple of decades where individuals find it impossible to get rid of crushing debt by filing bankruptcy, while corporations can do it seemingly constantly by just generating a shell company or two, burying it in old unrelated debt, then just flush it in bankruptcy court? I wonder who on earth paid for those new bankruptcy laws to be passed.
The last line – The sooner you get over your sense of loss and start to actively contribute your bits and pieces to making it work, the more likely you are to benefit from the transaction. – is true in most life situations!