Mike Wyatt's Weblog

Lessons from leading an acquisition effort

I've had the privilege of leading an acquisition effort that started about 1 year ago. The acquisition was completed in on Oct 13th. Since that time I've been the business leader in charge of running the acquired entity in addition to my day job running Sun's Architecture and Enablement services team for the Software Practice.

One of the lessons that is continually reinforced is the need for clear, concise, and consistent communication to various internal and external stakeholders. Much of my time is spent educating and informing internal groups about the objectives of the acquisition and the status on the integration. When you live something like an acquisition effort for a period of months, things are are seemingly obvious to you are definitely not obvious to other stakeholders, many of which will see things through a very different lens than your own.

In order to ensure that the key members of the integration effort including members of the acquired entity leadership team as well as leaders from the acquiring company are all singing from the same song sheet. The amount of investment to initial craft the key messages pales in comparison to the effort to overcome miscommunications.

Posted at 11:42PM Nov 13, 2006 by Michael Wyatt in Business Leadership  |