Monday, November 20, 2017

Mergers: The Good

(intro blog post here)

How to help your acquired employees succeed


Out of the 6 acquisitions I've been involved with, two really stand out as positive experiences, both for the acquired and the parent company. Here's what was different about those two mergers, as opposed to the ones that didn't go so well.

Integrate the new team quickly (Apple/NeXT)

In Apple's case, they acquired NeXT both in order to get new technology to base their next-generation OS on, and to get a fully-functional engineering organization. You can't really understand just how screwed up Apple was in 1996 unless you were there, but in the last quarter of the year, Apple lost over a billion dollars. They had, at that point, had 2 or 3 (depending on how you count) different "next generation" OS projects crash and burn, and the latest one, Copland, was on the verge of disaster – I've seen credible evidence that it wouldn't have shipped for another 5 years, if ever. Into all this swirling chaos, we bring the NeXT team, understandably freaked out to be called on to "save" this huge, dysfunctional company from itself.

But one thing that was hugely encouraging, and helped us to all settle in, was how quickly we were integrated into the Apple organization as a whole. Within a month after the acquisition, we were meeting with our counterparts in Cupertino, we had apple.com email addresses, our systems were on the Apple network, and we'd had an army of Apple HR folks over to the NeXT offices to get us transferred over to Apple's payroll and benefits.

It was still a very hard slog, and there was a LOT of anger from folks at Apple that had their friends laid off right after the acquisition, but feeling like we were legitimately part of the team, and not just a bunch of outsiders, helped us to fight the battles we had to fight.

Put the full support of the larger organization behind the newcomers (LG/WebOS)

After the debacle that was the HP's acquisition of Palm (see the "Ugly" segment, coming soon), the folks remaining on the WebOS team were pretty nervous when we were told that we were being sold off to LG. "Oh, great, another absentee owner who will tell us we're important, but then never do anything".

And then we had our first meetings with LG's upper management. And we were told that we would be building the user interface for all of LG's high-end smart TV's, that we were going to ship in less than a year, and that we were expected to deliver something BETTER than the existing NetCast software, which they had been shipping for a few years. "Oh, crap, I thought - none of us know anything about Smart TVs, or TVs in general". But then they told us: "The CEO has expressed his full support of this project, and you'll have as much support as you need".

I really didn't believe that we were going to get "as much support as you need", but sure enough, within a short time period after the acquisition, truckloads of current-generation TVs and prototype logic boards for the next generation started flooding into the office. And in the months after that, truckloads of engineers from Korea, who knew the hardware and the existing NetCast software intimately. Anything we asked for, we got – score one for top-down, authoritarian management style, I guess.

And we did it - a small group of developers, working their asses off, managed to build something in less than a year which was immensely better than the existing product, which had been shipping for several years. The next-generation smart TVs, with a new version of WebOS, were even better. This was definitely a high point for the "acquire a smaller company to bring innovation to the larger company" strategy. And it succeeded because the project had a powerful advocate within the larger company, and a VERY clear vision of what they wanted to accomplish.

Next week

What not to do to make your new employees feel welcome, and how to tell (as an employee) when things are likely to go sour quickly.

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