Retaining Key Employees While Managing Financial Risk
By Scott Oberstaedt, Willis Towers Watson, a Partner of M&A Leadership Council
Board of director approval is often the final stop for companies looking to make an acquisition offer, but it’s increasingly common for the compensation committee to be included in both the pre-announcement and pre-closing phases of major acquisitions. While mergers and acquisitions (M&A)...
Determining How Attractive European Assets Will be to Foreign Investors
Contributed by Intralinks, a Partner of M&A Leadership Council
Global dealmakers are likely to be extremely despondent this evening as European political boundaries shrink for the first time. According to Intralinks’ most recent M&A sentiment survey of almost 1,500 global dealmakers, the M&A community were very concerned about a ‘Brexit’, with 65% fearing...
Some Interesting M&A Data
Contributed by Mergermarket, a Partner of M&A Leadership Council
Mergermarket has released its Global M&A roundup for the first half (H1) of 2016, including its league tables for financial advisors. Take a look at the report HERE! A few key findings include:....
You’ve heard the old one-liner about the two things you never want to see being made. The first is sausage. The other is legislation. Or, in our case, M&A methodology.
In spite of all the talk about the importance of retaining key talent during M&A, surprisingly few organizations get this mission critical objective right. A while back, I heard the allegedly true story of how one Fortune 50 acquirer lost a nationally known key executive from a just-acquired company. Amid the typical post-closing chaos, the buyer just couldn’t seem to make key decisions.
Years ago, a client pinpointed the M&A readiness challenge: “Once the deal took off, our team never caught up.” Admittedly, anyone in the M&A business has had the experience of chasing a speeding train down the tracks after it had already left the station. If you are like me, you vowed never to do that again.
The CEO of a major client caught me off guard a while back with a profoundly simple, yet incredibly complex question: “What are the two most important principles for integration success?”
Admittedly, I had to fight the urge to respond flippantly with some blather about “communications, synergies and getting the people issues right.” All of these are correct, of course, and extremely important, but none of these rose to the level this executive was asking for.
The media has been ablaze recently with the dramatic news about the termination of the $35 billion “merger of equals” between global advertising, media and communications leaders Publicis Groupe SA and Omnicom Group, Inc. In glaring front page and “above-the-fold” headlines, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed on April 26, “Clashes Over Power Threaten $35 Billion Ad Agency Merger,” and finally on May 9, “Merger of Ad Giants Scuttled.”