Culture clashes in mergers and acquisitions
07 Dec 2009 | Posted By: Maria Markenroth
By: Cecilia Bjursell. Photos: Erhan Trsani
On Friday November 27 CeFEO (Centre for Family Enterprise and Ownership)* and Öhrlings PricewaterhouseCoopers hosted a breakfast seminar at ÖPWC Jönköping office.
At the seminar, we talked about the problems and opportunities that can be found when integrating organizations after mergers and acquisitions, M&A, with the purpose to make them more effective. Culture clashes can arise in an international work setting but is as likely to appear in cooperation between different organizations with the same nationality, between professional groups and/or between business units. We specifically addressed culture clashes in merging family businesses. Mattias Nordqvist introduced the seminar and gave a description of the practical and academic activities at CeFEO research center.
Anders Bernhardsson, ÖPWC, started the seminar by describing the ÖPWC M&A process for working with SMEs and owner-managed companies, and especially the development of the company after changed ownership and the role of the seller in the integration process.
PhD Cecilia Bjursell, research fellow at CeFEO, told the story of the Cloetta Fazer merger and gave examples of how what we call culture clashes in mergers and acquisitions is an oversimplification of multidimensional tensions in organizations.
Cecilia Bjursell described how a financially successful merger eventually ended up a failure, when the owners of Cloetta and Fazer decided to break up in 2008. The reason was that the two families that owned the firm could not agree on the strategies for future development.
Cecilia Bjursell also explained how the family business logic could influence aspects of an M&A process: a need for control could lead to low M&A activity, a long term perspective could influence how to deal with the integration process and a quick decision making process could influence the negotiation process. To that was added that a key word for merging family businesses is trust.
To illustrate the complexity in merging companies, Mikael Carlén presented the development via mergers and acquisitions in Öhrlings PricewaterhouseCoopers and gave practical examples of how you in the beginning could tell organizational belonging from the way people dressed.
The seminar was ended with a panel discussion when the audience got the chance to ask the presenters various questions about mergers and acquisitions. Some topics that were addressed were motives in M&A, how to work with cultural dimensions and international cooperation.
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