Review the SHRM, Once the Deal Is Done: Making Mergers Work shown below, and create an 810 PowerPoint slide presentation, with speaker notes, for organizational leaders.

Explain some key practices HR should include to successfully integrate two merged companies.

Explain key principles of an integration process. Include three principles in this assignment.

Explain what metrics can be used to measure the impact of a merger.

Analyze perspectives concerning HR professionals' roles relative to mergers and acquisitions.

Describe recommendations for including and maximizing HR's contribution to successful mergers and acquisitions. Describe 23 recommendations and consider sharing professional experiences.

ONCE THE DEAL IS DONE: MAKING MERGERS WORK

Wayne Cascio Hi. I am Wayne Cascio. Every year, there are thousands of mergers and acquisitions, totaling trillions of dollars worldwide. While deals are typically done for financial reasons, research shows that roughly two-thirds fail to live up to the expectations set for them. Once a deal is done, no task is more important than managing people effectively in a newly created firm. Many studies have found that integrating different organizational cultures is the top challenge in mergers and acquisitions. Cultures may differ in a number of ways, such as customs of conducting business, how people are expected to act, and the kinds of behaviors that get rewarded.

This is a story about a merger that did not fail, one that lived up to the high expectations set for it. This year, the SHRM Foundation partnered with the Australian Human Resources Institute to feature the winner of its national competition in Australia for a firm that best exemplifies responsible restructuring. That firm is Bupa Australia, now the nation's largest privately managed health insurance group. Bupa Australia, then the country's third largest health insurer, engineered a merger with the MBF Group, Australia's second largest health insurer. The merged company had a new focus, namely to become a health care partner for its customers. Senior leaders in both firms recognize that great people were the key to delivering this promise. Thus, a major objective in the new company was to retain talented people.

This year, our focus is on the post-merger integration process, which is critical when two large companies join together. Now, let us meet Bupa's senior leaders and major players in the merger as they describe what, why, and how they did what they did.

Richard Bowden We were the requiring entity, Bupa, and we were at number three in the market. We are operating at about 11% of share. We were buying and then merging with number two in the market that had 18% share. One of the dynamics we had to deal with is, you know, small buying big out here in the market. For the business case, was... it was basically about, you know, us getting acquisition and a merger across the line and the strategic value in that. We have been talking to MBF for a long time and the thing that really made it in the end apart from the $2.4 billion it took to buy the business was that the MBF directors and council could see that this... if this business model was applied to a larger business, it would extract value and the customers would get a better deal.

Wayne Cascio Although Peter Wilson did not participate in the merger, he is a well-respected voice on the subject having taken part in many, himself.

Peter Wilson If you are going to be part of a dynamic environment, you expect to be involved in mergers and acquisitions, and I was involved in seven major ones out of my career. I think there is always a high priority put in to the financial side or the synergy benefits, but the case to successful integration on how you manage the people.

Hishan El-Ansary Bupa globally invested 2.4 billion in the acquisition of MBF back in 2008, and as a consequence of ensuring that the return on that investment was proceeding according to plans, the integration board was formed with a specific focus on over-sighting the program of integration that the business was undertaking.

The meetings were every month and that would generally go for three to four hours and it would spend all aspects of the program of works that were planned to be delivered, as well as an assessment of how we are tracking against the synergy savings that had been set as part of the merger.

Penny Lovett The approach that we took to designing the integration process was really important in creating a powerful cultural symbol for the organization. So there were three key principles that would provide the overarching guideline for how we designed our integration process.

The first principle was that we were creating something new. We were not simply imposing the old Bupa Australia people model or the MBF model, but rather creating something new for the... this new business.

The second principle was that this... we needed to take people on the journey with us and that meant that the way we integrate it, these teams, would create a very powerful cultural symbol for the future.

And finally, that we needed to create certainty quickly for our people so that they could focus on the main game, which is looking after our customers.

Mark Engel The first principle we adopted was to very much focus on the external market or focus ourselves in our marketing people on the customers, in particular, on our stakeholders and other key providers and suppliers. The last thing we wanted to do was see any of our customers leave the business as a consequence of the merger.

Hishan El-Ansary We recognized quite early that it was important to consolidate those financial systems as a key priority for providing a solid platform and foundation for the business and we set about establishing what was referred to as the financial systems integration project, probably towards the end of the first year and within about six or seven months, we had achieved the full consolidation of the MBF accounting system into the Bupa accounting system, and it made a lot easier being able to go to one source of the truth to generate information.

We are now starting to ask ourselves, "Okay, we have one system, we have one set of processes, we are meeting all of the requirements to support the business, but how can we do it better? How can we do it faster, more efficient with better insight into the business?"

Christine Stewart We created an identity of our own. It was bringing the team that never worked together previously, of course. And the good thing about it was that the culture within each of the respective organizations was very similar, was very customer-centric. So it was not about changing culture too much around the customer experience, it was more bringing the teams together to one team on company.

Penny Lovett When you go live on a merger, there are so much noise and people are hungry for information. So our challenge was to ensure that our planning was so tight that we were able to provide the right information in the right way at the right time for all of our people, and that meant that we had to provide information through a range of channels and in a range of different ways that people could get the information in a way that worked for them.

The other challenge was that quite often we did not have the answers to the questions that people had, and so we had to be very honest quite often and say, "Actually, I do not have the answer to that question, but I will let you know as soon as we do."

Richard Bowden We filled 230 executive jobs in a hundred days through an open, transparent process. No one was placed at jobs. People had to apply, serve, position description had to be developed, remuneration schedules, interviews conducted, all of those... all those sort of things.

Penny Lovett As each level of selection took place, there were a number of people who were left without roles. So we decided that rather than let those people go immediately, we would put those people into a redeployment pool with the objective of trying to find alternative roles for those individuals.

Kate Christiansen The fears were quite understandable and I think they were the fears that we predicted. So, that sense of uncertainty, "What is going to happen to me? What is going to happen to my manager?"

Dr. Christine Bennett Groups like the hospitals and the doctors that we contract with would want to know what is this going to mean for the contracts with us, so we have to add a beat that was related to them, or the government, for example, might be wondering what does this mean for customers and will there be any changes that are likely to breach regulations.

Mark Engel We run a comprehensive integrated communication program across the merger period. One of the early things we did was make sure we align both the internal communications with the external communications. We had a small team of people that actually meant to work through key messages and plan the implementation of the communication program. I was given the full mandate of our communications both internal at that point and external across all the stakeholder groups, including obviously, customers.

Dr. Christine Bennett We want to make sure we got consistent messages. So there was a lot of coordination, logistics, to make sure that we... who had the principal relationship, who is communicating, that we are all reading from the same hand sheet, that it was done in a timely way.

Penny Lovett We use all of the normal communication vehicles that you would expect in a merger situation from town hall meetings to face-to-face briefings for all of our people. In fact, our leadership team, two of the country, met with all of our people face-to-face twice in the first 100 days. We also used printed newsletters, e-Newsletters. And in fact, on the first day of going live on the merger, we launched a new website for all of our people. It was a place where we provided information about the merger. We provided information about the integration process. Job vacancies were posted there.

Peter Wilson I am afraid mergers fail because they are often conceived and executed in a very clinical atmosphere of head office amongst the most senior people of an organization and then it all seems to be left to somebody else to make happen and that approach never succeeds.

Richard Bowden More than anything else, what is important is the culture in organizations. So we put a lot of effort into all the change initiatives that we are putting in place because every conversation you have in organizations builds the culture. We put a way in which we went about the whole restructure in the first place that set a lot about what we want to be.

Penny Lovett In the first 100 days, there was a risk that people might not always get all of the information that they needed. So we developed the Merger Champions Program to address that risk.

Monika Gunther One of the main aims of the Champion Program is to understand what the concerns were and then put things into place to address those. The program really designed as a forum to communicate pieces of the information, give more detail about some of the reasons why decision might have been made, but most importantly, it was a mechanism to actually capture what our people were feeling.

I was one of the facilitators in South Australia and Western Australia as well. Our Human Resources area sponsored the program and run the program. So we would have a fortnightly briefing as the facilitators and then we would cascade that information to our delegates and those delegates were people from every area of the business that really... representing our people and our frontline.

Hishan El-Ansary It is the nature of acquisitions that you get the case on day one and on day two, people are expecting to understand how the business, the new combined business is tracking. In keeping with a lot of companies, we tend to take a balanced scorecard approach. So the financial metrics are obviously an important aspect of any commercial business operation and we certainly had a number of those, by profitability, in terms of returns that were generated, but also in terms of the cost and saving synergies that were established.

But we recognize that in order to achieve good financial performance, you also needed to have a culture that was collaborative and embraced the aspirations and the vision that the management team had and as a consequence, we had some quite strong targets around stuff, opinion surveys, and also an external perspective, how our customers were feeling about the merger and the service level and service quality that they were experiencing.

Tony Forster There are several key measures that you continually look at and generally, they are around the speed at which you observe your customer. I also spent quite a bit of time listening to phone calls in our contact centers as well as reviewing our customer complaints and really understanding what it was that was driving customers crazy, basically.

Penny Lovett The key metrics that we use on an ongoing basis are our employee engagement survey. In addition to that, we run monthly pulse checks across the business, which gave us just a short, snappy insight into how people were thinking and feeling about the work we were doing across the business.

Mark Engel We kept a close watch out on our customer satisfaction and customer feedback, customer compliance. We also talk about stakeholders regularly, be it government or regulators, providers and suppliers. And I guess the main thing was listening, you know, listening and responding.

Richard Bowden We will complete the integration program a year and half ahead of plan, which is just terrific. What is even more pleasing for me is that, you know, what we have stayed focus on is keeping the morale up and the customer satisfaction up, so employee engagement and morale continue to go up. It is nearly at 80%. Our customer satisfaction is up at around 82.

Tony Forster Almost two-thirds of our people were leaving or were new. We got that down under 20% within the first 12 months.

Mark Engel We actually improved our market share position for three consecutive quarters after the merger. So we actually found that the focus on doing thing better, aligning and having clear messages and having people more galvanized around, you know, a clear purpose. I actually see this improve our business growth through that period.

Richard Bowden Probably the one that comes, you know, first to mind whenever I think about change is no matter what your estimate in time, you can always do it quicker and that was really important as we entered this process. It was the thing that I highlighted most to the team. What you cannot have if you want to get real change, what you cannot have is big gaps between the implementation. You cannot have people waiting... months before they see a change and it is going to... you know, people are going to experience. Trust your instincts, especially in a merger. There are so much self-interest that happens, whether suppliers or employees or someone's favorite computer system or product or whatever it is, trust your instincts and trust, you know, trust your experience in these things.

Second one was keep people busy. Support those people who are driving the change, where the most amount of change is and that is right, but also worried about those people who are not experiencing any change. Align them with your culture and made it seem sensible, maybe you think you can read it on a textbook, but you know, you cannot. You have just got to align everything to do with the culture you want for the business. Think about the future, think about the culture you want, design your programs to meet that.

Dr. Christine Bennett We learned a lot. First of all, often we have to tell people things five times before they get the message. It is very important for us to be consistent, to have the same story going to all parties at the same time.

The third thing is if you do not have that information getting out there, you know, very currently, and there is a void of information, then people will start to have rumors or make assumptions, and it is much harder to undo the wrong messages that are getting out than to actually have your own story being put out in your way in your own time.

The final learning really is that this sort of communication is ongoing. It is a living process and it is a great opportunity to tell your story and to keep telling it through the relationships that you build.

Penny Lovett Having our leaders very visible throughout the process was critical for success. Having a plan provides the roadmap that you need for success. It is important to have someone manage that plan and manage it very tightly. It is very important to make sure that you get the balance right between using your own people, in managing the integration activity and using experts because it is your own people who understand your culture and understand how to get things done, and I think that helps drive success.

Mark Engel There were a few people early that I would say were not on the bus. They were not necessarily buying into the culture and we probably tolerated some of those behaviors a bit too long.

Kate Christiansen Knowing when enough change is enough change and just stabilizing is also very important.

Peter Powell Focus on the people first. I think one of the things that I did was focus on the integration first, what are the things we got to integrate and I think I should just spend more time, particularly with the team that I did not know very well, because getting all of those people harnessed and focused at the early stage enables you to actually deliver much faster.

The technology is the technology. It is a tool to support the business, but it requires the people to transform it, to develop it, and to support it.

Wayne Cascio Research has identified five key drivers of success in post-merger integration. They have proven successful at Bupa Australia and they apply to any merger. Have a well-articulated strategy that identifies how the merger will be integrated. Be sure it reinforces the message that this is a merger of equals, if that is true, rather than an acquisition, and that all decisions are based on merit, not favoritism or bias.

Establish a fulltime integration team with ample resources and strong leadership. Ensure that the team is balanced with members from both companies. Communication from senior management should be constant and consistent. It should build confidence in the merger and integration process, including tangible goals and address a variety of stakeholder concerns. Above all, avoid the four No's, no secrets, no surprises, no hype, and no empty promises.

Speed and integration is critical. Employees, customers, and stock market analysts all dislike uncertainty for it offer and engenders fear and suspicion. Conversely, fast decisions reduce uncertainty, promotes stability, and help achieves strategic goals. Create a set of financial and non-financial measures that will help track the overall performance of the new company. Be sure that they align with the strategy envisioned for the merger. For example, some non-financial measures include customer and employee satisfaction and retention, risk management and cultural integration. Managing a merger is difficult and there are many potential barriers to success.

As Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland once said, "If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there" we might add, but you are more likely to get there if you have a map. Thank you, Bupa Australia, for giving us all a map to merger success. You have shown us that the post-merger integration process can be managed successfully, when it is employees, customers, and shareholders all win.

Wayne Cascio Hi. I am Wayne Cascio. Every year, there are thousands of mergers and acquisitions, totaling trillions of dollars worldwide. While deals are typically done for financial reasons, research shows that roughly two-thirds fail to live up to the expectations set for them. Once a deal is done, no task is more important than managing people effectively in a newly created firm. Many studies have found that integrating different organizational cultures is the top challenge in mergers and acquisitions. Cultures may differ in a number of ways, such as customs of conducting business, how people are expected to act, and the kinds of behaviors that get rewarded.

This is a story about a merger that did not fail, one that lived up to the high expectations set for it. This year, the SHRM Foundation partnered with the Australian Human Resources Institute to feature the winner of its national competition in Australia for a firm that best exemplifies responsible restructuring. That firm is Bupa Australia, now the nation's largest privately managed health insurance group. Bupa Australia, then the country's third largest health insurer, engineered a merger with the MBF Group, Australia's second largest health insurer. The merged company had a new focus, namely to become a health care partner for its customers. Senior leaders in both firms recognize that great people were the key to delivering this promise. Thus, a major objective in the new company was to retain talented people.

This year, our focus is on the post-merger integration process, which is critical when two large companies join together. Now, let us meet Bupa's senior leaders and major players in the merger as they describe what, why, and how they did what they did.

Richard Bowden We were the requiring entity, Bupa, and we were at number three in the market. We are operating at about 11% of share. We were buying and then merging with number two in the market that had 18% share. One of the dynamics we had to deal with is, you know, small buying big out here in the market. For the business case, was... it was basically about, you know, us getting acquisition and a merger across the line and the strategic value in that. We have been talking to MBF for a long time and the thing that really made it in the end apart from the $2.4 billion it took to buy the business was that the MBF directors and council could see that this... if this business model was applied to a larger business, it would extract value and the customers would get a better deal.

Wayne Cascio Although Peter Wilson did not participate in the merger, he is a well-respected voice on the subject having taken part in many, himself.

Peter Wilson If you are going to be part of a dynamic environment, you expect to be involved in mergers and acquisitions, and I was involved in seven major ones out of my career. I think there is always a high priority put in to the financial side or the synergy benefits, but the case to successful integration on how you manage the people.

Hishan El-Ansary Bupa globally invested 2.4 billion in the acquisition of MBF back in 2008, and as a consequence of ensuring that the return on that investment was proceeding according to plans, the integration board was formed with a specific focus on over-sighting the program of integration that the business was undertaking.

The meetings were every month and that would generally go for three to four hours and it would spend all aspects of the program of works that were planned to be delivered, as well as an assessment of how we are tracking against the synergy savings that had been set as part of the merger.

Penny Lovett The approach that we took to designing the integration process was really important in creating a powerful cultural symbol for the organization. So there were three key principles that would provide the overarching guideline for how we designed our integration process.

The first principle was that we were creating something new. We were not simply imposing the old Bupa Australia people model or the MBF model, but rather creating something new for the... this new business.

The second principle was that this... we needed to take people on the journey with us and that meant that the way we integrate it, these teams, would create a very powerful cultural symbol for the future.

And finally, that we needed to create certainty quickly for our people so that they could focus on the main game, which is looking after our customers.

Mark Engel The first principle we adopted was to very much focus on the external market or focus ourselves in our marketing people on the customers, in particular, on our stakeholders and other key providers and suppliers. The last thing we wanted to do was see any of our customers leave the business as a consequence of the merger.

Hishan El-Ansary We recognized quite early that it was important to consolidate those financial systems as a key priority for providing a solid platform and foundation for the business and we set about establishing what was referred to as the financial systems integration project, probably towards the end of the first year and within about six or seven months, we had achieved the full consolidation of the MBF accounting system into the Bupa accounting system, and it made a lot easier being able to go to one source of the truth to generate information.

We are now starting to ask ourselves, "Okay, we have one system, we have one set of processes, we are meeting all of the requirements to support the business, but how can we do it better? How can we do it faster, more efficient with better insight into the business?"

Christine Stewart We created an identity of our own. It was bringing the team that never worked together previously, of course. And the good thing about it was that the culture within each of the respective organizations was very similar, was very customer-centric. So it was not about changing culture too much around the customer experience, it was more bringing the teams together to one team on company.

Penny Lovett When you go live on a merger, there are so much noise and people are hungry for information. So our challenge was to ensure that our planning was so tight that we were able to provide the right information in the right way at the right time for all of our people, and that meant that we had to provide information through a range of channels and in a range of different ways that people could get the information in a way that worked for them.

The other challenge was that quite often we did not have the answers to the questions that people had, and so we had to be very honest quite often and say, "Actually, I do not have the answer to that question, but I will let you know as soon as we do."

Richard Bowden We filled 230 executive jobs in a hundred days through an open, transparent process. No one was placed at jobs. People had to apply, serve, position description had to be developed, remuneration schedules, interviews conducted, all of those... all those sort of things.

Penny Lovett As each level of selection took place, there were a number of people who were left without roles. So we decided that rather than let those people go immediately, we would put those people into a redeployment pool with the objective of trying to find alternative roles for those individuals.

Kate Christiansen The fears were quite understandable and I think they were the fears that we predicted. So, that sense of uncertainty, "What is going to happen to me? What is going to happen to my manager?"

Dr. Christine Bennett Groups like the hospitals and the doctors that we contract with would want to know what is this going to mean for the contracts with us, so we have to add a beat that was related to them, or the government, for example, might be wondering what does this mean for customers and will there be any changes that are likely to breach regulations.

Mark Engel We run a comprehensive integrated communication program across the merger period. One of the early things we did was make sure we align both the internal communications with the external communications. We had a small team of people that actually meant to work through key messages and plan the implementation of the communication program. I was given the full mandate of our communications both internal at that point and external across all the stakeholder groups, including obviously, customers.

Dr. Christine Bennett We want to make sure we got consistent messages. So there was a lot of coordination, logistics, to make sure that we... who had the principal relationship, who is communicating, that we are all reading from the same hand sheet, that it was done in a timely way.

Penny Lovett We use all of the normal communication vehicles that you would expect in a merger situation from town hall meetings to face-to-face briefings for all of our people. In fact, our leadership team, two of the country, met with all of our people face-to-face twice in the first 100 days. We also used printed newsletters, e-Newsletters. And in fact, on the first day of going live on the merger, we launched a new website for all of our people. It was a place where we provided information about the merger. We provided information about the integration process. Job vacancies were posted there.

Peter Wilson I am afraid mergers fail because they are often conceived and executed in a very clinical atmosphere of head office amongst the most senior people of an organization and then it all seems to be left to somebody else to make happen and that approach never succeeds.

Richard Bowden More than anything else, what is important is the culture in organizations. So we put a lot of effort into all the change initiatives that we are putting in place because every conversation you have in organizations builds the culture. We put a way in which we went about the whole restructure in the first place that set a lot about what we want to be.

Penny Lovett In the first 100 days, there was a risk that people might not always get all of the information that they needed. So we developed the Merger Champions Program to address that risk.

Monika Gunther One of the main aims of the Champion Program is to understand what the concerns were and then put things into place to address those. The program really designed as a forum to communicate pieces of the information, give more detail about some of the reasons why decision might have been made, but most importantly, it was a mechanism to actually capture what our people were feeling.

I was one of the facilitators in South Australia and Western Australia as well. Our Human Resources area sponsored the program and run the program. So we would have a fortnightly briefing as the facilitators and then we would cascade that information to our delegates and those delegates were people from every area of the business that really... representing our people and our frontline.

Hishan El-Ansary It is the nature of acquisitions that you get the case on day one and on day two, people are expecting to understand how the business, the new combined business is tracking. In keeping with a lot of companies, we tend to take a balanced scorecard approach. So the financial metrics are obviously an important aspect of any commercial business operation and we certainly had a number of those, by profitability, in terms of returns that were generated, but also in terms of the cost and saving synergies that were established.

But we recognize that in order to achieve good financial performance, you also needed to have a culture that was collaborative and embraced the aspirations and the vision that the management team had and as a consequence, we had some quite strong targets around stuff, opinion surveys, and also an external perspective, how our customers were feeling about the merger and the service level and service quality that they were experiencing.

Tony Forster There are several key measures that you continually look at and generally, they are around the speed at which you observe your customer. I also spent quite a bit of time listening to phone calls in our contact centers as well as reviewing our customer complaints and really understanding what it was that was driving customers crazy, basically.

Penny Lovett The key metrics that we use on an ongoing basis are our employee engagement survey. In addition to that, we run monthly pulse checks across the business, which gave us just a short, snappy insight into how people were thinking and feeling about the work we were doing across the business.

Mark Engel We kept a close watch out on our customer satisfaction and customer feedback, customer compliance. We also talk about stakeholders regularly, be it government or regulators, providers and suppliers. And I guess the main thing was listening, you know, listening and responding.

Richard Bowden We will complete the integration program a year and half ahead of plan, which is just terrific. What is even more pleasing for me is that, you know, what we have stayed focus on is keeping the morale up and the customer satisfaction up, so employee engagement and morale continue to go up. It is nearly at 80%. Our customer satisfaction is up at around 82.

Tony Forster Almost two-thirds of our people were leaving or were new. We got that down under 20% within the first 12 months.

Mark Engel We actually improved our market share position for three consecutive quarters after the merger. So we actually found that the focus on doing thing better, aligning and having clear messages and having people more galvanized around, you know, a clear purpose. I actually see this improve our business growth through that period.

Richard Bowden Probably the one that comes, you know, first to mind whenever I think about change is no matter what your estimate in time, you can always do it quicker and that was really important as we entered this process. It was the thing that I highlighted most to the team. What you cannot have if you want to get real change, what you cannot have is big gaps between the implementation. You cannot have people waiting... months before they see a change and it is going to... you know, people are going to experience. Trust your instincts, especially in a merger. There are so much self-interest that happens, whether suppliers or employees or someone's favorite computer system or product or whatever it is, trust your instincts and trust, you know, trust your experience in these things.

Second one was keep people busy. Support those people who are driving the change, where the most amount of change is and that is right, but also worried about those people who are not experiencing any change. Align them with your culture and made it seem sensible, maybe you think you can read it on a textbook, but you know, you cannot. You have just got to align everything to do with the culture you want for the business. Think about the future, think about the culture you want, design your programs to meet that.

Dr. Christine Bennett We learned a lot. First of all, often we have to tell people things five times before they get the message. It is very important for us to be consistent, to have the same story going to all parties at the same time.

The third thing is if you do not have that information getting out there, you know, very currently, and there is a void of information, then people will start to have rumors or make assumptions, and it is much harder to undo the wrong messages that are getting out than to actually have your own story being put out in your way in your own time.

The final learning really is that this sort of communication is ongoing. It is a living process and it is a great opportunity to tell your story and to keep telling it through the relationships that you build.

Penny Lovett Having our leaders very visible throughout the process was critical for success. Having a plan provides the roadmap that you need for success. It is important to have someone manage that plan and manage it very tightly. It is very important to make sure that you get the balance right between using your own people, in managing the integration activity and using experts because it is your own people who understand your culture and understand how to get things done, and I think that helps drive success.

Mark Engel There were a few people early that I would say were not on the bus. They were not necessarily buying into the culture and we probably tolerated some of those behaviors a bit too long.

Kate Christiansen Knowing when enough change is enough change and just stabilizing is also very important.

Peter Powell Focus on the people first. I think one of the things that I did was focus on the integration first, what are the things we got to integrate and I think I should just spend more time, particularly with the team that I did not know very well, because getting all of those people harnessed and focused at the early stage enables you to actually deliver much faster.

The technology is the technology. It is a tool to support the business, but it requires the people to transform it, to develop it, and to support it.

Wayne Cascio Research has identified five key drivers of success in post-merger integration. They have proven successful at Bupa Australia and they apply to any merger. Have a well-articulated strategy that identifies how the merger will be integrated. Be sure it reinforces the message that this is a merger of equals, if that is true, rather than an acquisition, and that all decisions are based on merit, not favoritism or bias.

Establish a fulltime integration team with ample resources and strong leadership. Ensure that the team is balanced with members from both companies. Communication from senior management should be constant and consistent. It should build confidence in the merger and integration process, including tangible goals and address a variety of stakeholder concerns. Above all, avoid the four No's, no secrets, no surprises, no hype, and no empty promises.

Speed and integration is critical. Employees, customers, and stock market analysts all dislike uncertainty for it offer and engenders fear and suspicion. Conversely, fast decisions reduce uncertainty, promotes stability, and help achieves strategic goals. Create a set of financial and non-financial measures that will help track the overall performance of the new company. Be sure that they align with the strategy envisioned for the merger. For example, some non-financial measures include customer and employee satisfaction and retention, risk management and cultural integration. Managing a merger is difficult and there are many potential barriers to success.

As Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland once said, "If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there" we might add, but you are more likely to get there if you have a map. Thank you, Bupa Australia, for giving us all a map to merger success. You have shown us that the post-merger integration process can be managed successfully, when it is employees, customers, and shareholders all win.