Let me offer an example. I worked for a Fortune 500 company that acquired a competitor (keep your friends close and enemies closer kind of thing). Trying to take management teams from both sides and integrating them was more combative than challenging. This was one of our first acquisitions. Think of it like this - what I call a couch others may call a sofa. There were so many differences. The firm hired a consultant - a change practitioner focusing on integrating culture and processes and breaking down walls. (We also had an internal change manager - discussed in another post - that brought in this consultant as part of the overall - company wide - process. Back to the consultant, she brought the management staff together, face to face, creating teams (half from each side) with unrelated responsibilities -- it was daunting - we had so many duplicate functions/managers/roles, etc. Then we were presented with game boards (think monopoly). We were then given tasks, time frames 30-60 minutes, and asked to map out processes. Something as simple as order processing - but when you see both approaches on one big board you understand the differences integration can begin. First