Reverse Cultural Integration

A lot has been written about cultural integration in the acquisition process. When you acquire a business you often need to align the target company culture to your existing corporate culture. You put the team through training, you explain new policies, and you provide mentorship. But in many cases we don’t think about reverse cultural and regression.

Particularly for acquisitions that are supposed to be innovation engines it’s important to consider why they are such attractive targets. Often their culture is more tied to future growth and opportunity. Whether it’s Adriel thinking in development or a new approach to customer centricity the target team may have developed a more effective culture particularly for entering new spaces where they have been successful.

If you strip that culture away you may damage the value of the assets you’ve acquired. Even more importantly you will miss an opportunity to evolve your own culture. The power dynamic between the acquirer and the target often makes it hard to drive the absorption of an acquired culture into the mothership. This requires a lot of conscious effort. It often starts by not doing cultural integration on the target. Let them remain a bubble of new thinking and overtime try to figure out how to push some of those key lessons into your own organization.

Being proactive in thinking about where you want to land on culture is often critical to the value of an acquisition. Since it’s such a subjective and often emotionally right topic it usually doesn’t get the attention it deserves.