James B. Rieley is publishing a weekly leadership development newsletter titled Plain Talk about Business Performance. I had the pleasure of working with Jim a few years ago in London and am pleased to be able to access his knowledge and experience once again. Here’s an excerpt from the most recent newsletter.
Certainly, a bigger organisation should have the ability to leverage its total assets to be more competitive. But and this is a very important but do the key decision-makers at Morgan/Chase and Sanofi-Synthelabo really think that this will be the case? If we look historically at similar acquisitions, what we find is the fabric of companies that have either been acquired, merged, consolidated or whatever, often riddled with less than anticipated performance. And at the end of the day, it is performance that dictates whether an organisation will survive, not physical size. One would hope that the real goal is to build “a better company, not just a bigger company.”