After the Merger: The Authoritative Guide for Integration Success, Revised Edition

This is an excellent book for those who are not M & A experts. It is structured well for ease of understanding and have clear advice that can help you create you own M & A to do list.

Despite the breathless headlines about the latest billion-dollar merger, most mergers don't work. In fact, more than half of all mergers fail, derailed by a common set of pitfalls. Companies merge without considering how they'll integrate after the deal; they don't communicate properly with their employees, and executives don't make decisions quickly enough to placate frightened workers. The executives who navigate mergers effectively are those who communicate well, deal with ambiguity and make decisions in times of instability. Author Price Pritchett offers an easily digested primer on the hazards of mergers, and lists hints for avoiding common problems. The authors provide plenty of concrete examples showing how such companies as Sony, Wells Fargo and the Chicago Sun-Times suffered from the dilemmas that accompany mergers. We ... recommend this comprehensive guide for managers on both sides of a business marriage. Caution: Read After the Merger before you merge.

As a project manager who picked up integrating a merger as one of his projects, I found this book to be very helpful. Mergers bring out confusion, tension and stress to all sides. This book focused on how to bridge these gaps through effective communication and project management. Particularly, I found chapter 10 (General Guidelines for Merger/Acquisition Management) insightful and I used the checklists in this chapter in portions of our integration effort. What I felt this book missed were templates designed to immediately pick up and use in my everyday life.I found the book is a quick read-I read it on one airplane trip. Many of the comments are very simple and fall into the category of common sense. However, in much of this common sense many of the problems of integrating two companies exist.