Lamela Blog Part 10: When a CXX Doesn’t Need to be an MBA to Know The What and the How…

In my trusted advisor role with CEO’s (or members of the C Suite) I always try to get my clients perspectives on the key guiding principle that define their leadership role in their company. Over time it became clear that many were not focused on these key business drivers much to my dismay. Ask yourself have you included one or more of these as your legacy to preserve and better expand the scope and direction of your company.

To be clear, the key rules of business I am referring to are (not necessarily in order):

• Guard & Improve Cash Flow
• Demand Return on Investment (ROI) [Accountable Capital Investment Process]
• Cut Your Losses Now
• Go for Growth [Condition the leadership team to use BHAGS*]
• THINK & then THINK outside the box [involve Talent to assist you if necessary to provide thought leadership]

In my next blog series interrelated with the need for change leadership in today’s global competition I will visit with each of these necessary and role defining first actions to best redeploy resources, cut unproductive losses, and raise the bar for innovation and investment of a company’s finite capital.

Which of these do you feel belongs (or not) in the key axioms for business?

*BHAG [Big Hairy Audacious Goal]

also sometimes referred to as Stretch Goals

Lamela Blog – Part 9: How Change Management Relates to Mergers and Aquisitions

How Change Management Relates to M&A

by Mark Lamela

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) represent a key vehicle to obtain growth for many companies. Given the importance of M&A and the complex challenges that organizations face in their M&A endeavors, it is surprising that the approach to M&A is so unstructured. Change Management, systems thinking and Integrated technologies can transform an unstructured process by facilitating all dimensions of the M&A process including defining strategy, organizing a deal, and executing a transaction.

Forrester Research recently concluded a study whose findings showed:

• The global economic recession has fundamentally changed M&A. The recession led to a significant drop in global M&A activity while changing the underlying approach to conducting transactions. M&A professionals are demanding more dedicated structure and process in an environment that has become increasingly volatile.

• The pre-deal phase is the most challenging to manage. This is true for M&A professionals on both the buy and sell side. Effectively and efficiently gathering and assessing information about buyers and sellers is a major impediment to success.

• Performance measurement, collaboration, and communication are key issues. M&A management challenges include effectively measuring performance in terms of costs and synergies, as well as ensuring effective and efficient collaboration and communication with both internal and external parties.

• A successful M&A “system” encompasses four functional components. A higher M&A competence is strongly correlated to improvements in transaction activities in terms of quality and quantity. Four components evolve in this context to institutionalize a successful M&A system required for a strong competence: strategy, organization, process, and technology.

• · Technology use and satisfaction differ across deal phase and company types. Financial content platforms and virtual deal rooms (VDRs) dominate the pre-deal and transaction phases. In the integration and operation phases, generic project management software and collaboration solutions are seeing the highest use. However, the satisfaction scores show room for improvement for all technology solutions.

• The next-generation M&A management approach has a broad and integrated set of capabilities. Deal professionals require a broad and integrated set of capabilities in an M&A management tool. Program/Project management and Change Leadership/ Management with collaboration capabilities are the top priority, followed by email management, workflow management, business intelligence and analytics, and content and market data capabilities.

Vardell Blog Part 9: Don’t Let Up – But Do It Wisely

Don’t Let Up

But Do It Wisely

By Dave Vardell

When you launch a major change initiative with a group of managers who are already exhausted and along the way are required to become leaders, it is tempting to let off the gas after a few quality wins.  Just to illustrate, one of our new leaders was on the way to meet one of his peers in a distant city.  He was so tired he pulled over at a rest stop and crawled in his back seat to sleep because he was falling asleep at the wheel.

How do you keep urgency strong when successes start to come in and people are just exhausted?  That was a tough reality that we had to face collectively, individually, and when no one was looking.  Fundamentally, no one wanted to let the others down.  If you are a team, then that is how you think continuously.  This is proof that you are a team.  So you could say that a major source of urgency for us was to not break trust.  Michael Covey says in his excellent work The Speed of Trust (Oct. 2006) expressed in terms of a simple quotient: strategy x execution = results.  He says if you have low trust you get little results.  However, if you have high Trust you realize excellent results as in s x e x T = R.  We all know this to be true.  So why do we manage like it is not?

Another key factor is to pace oneself.  Burnout is a real threat as I illustrated earlier.  It was key for me as a Leader to demonstrate this for my team by setting the example.  Vacations were scheduled and taken as scheduled.  We as a team debated with each other what was critical for success and committed to do those priorities and committed to do nothing else.

We developed a phrase back then that I still use today – “slower is faster”.  Shocking isn’t it that such a concept would come out of a Type ‘A’ personality’s mouth?  It sounds on the surface contradictory and that is why I use it.  I want to get people’s attention and cause them to stop and think. “Slower is faster” is like saying “ready, aim, fire” instead of the ineffective “ready, fire, aim”.  This became real wisdom for us as we saw it pay repeated dividends.