The Merger Dividend - July/August 2011

The Merger Dividend talks about the opportunities that M&A presents to Human Resource development, especially leader development. But in taking advantage of these opportunities, there are 3 things that need to take note of during the M&A process and they are:

1) Getting everyone on the same page.
Creating a strategy and communicating that strategy should be done with small room for interpretation. There is a need to develop a vision, the "merger intent". Documenting the "merger intent" outlines the expectation and hold people accountable to meeting these goals. During the integration process companies should discourage employees from withholding back ideas for fear of repercussion. Hiring of an external vendor could help to consolidate and then submit a report of feedback gathered. The negative feedback are then debated openly with employees to give transparency.

2) Executing with Discipline
Using the M&A process gives an opportunity to train potential leaders in execution. Give these new leaders opportunities to shine, understand different parts of the companies and manage different types of people. Given the tight timelines, the tasks stretches these potential leaders.

3) Building an A-Team
M&A gives opportunities to potential leaders to build the team that they want but such tasks currently are left to the HR to decide who to go and also the assignment of job roles. Potential leaders should take the opportunities to assess the skills sets that they think are critical and build an A-Team for themselves. From the selection and given some time, they are then able to see the results of their choices and with the experience, make better decision better in terms of identifying, hiring and retaining talents.

The Unselfish Gene - July/August 2011

The Unselfish Gene talks about bringing out the Collaborative nature of humans. Since the longest time, humans are believed to be rational individuals that takes care of their own needs above the rest. As such, most of the theories especially economic theories are able to predict human behaviors quite successfully.

In the article, the author has provided evidence through science that collaborative-ness is also found inherently in human beings as well. What is most important or the key takeaway from the article is the 7 building blocks of building a collaborative system/culture in a company.

1) Communication
2) Framing & Authenticity
3) Empathy & Solidarity
4) Fairness & Morality
5) Rewards & Punishment
6) Reputation & Reciprocity
7) Diversity

The article also gave an explanation as to why the model of rationality still exist which I believe are the resistance to change as well and they are:

1) Partial Truth
2) History
3) Habit
4) Simplicity

Given the fact that we are moving into a Knowledge Economy where collaboration is important to generate a lot of creative sparks, to create synergy, understanding the building blocks of a collaborative system/culture would allow companies to increase the value they are getting from their staff.

Before you make that decision... - June 2011

Before you make that decision is an article in Harvard Business Review that talks about how bias can distort business decision and how we should avoid it. It also talks about the difficulty in avoiding such bias and thus has proposed the following 12 questions to help management detect and dismiss such bias. The questions are:


Questions that decision makers should ask themselves:
1) Is there any reason to suspect motivated errors, or errors driven by self-interest of the recommending team?
2) Have the people making the recommendation fallen in love with it?
3) Were there dissenting opinions within the recommending team?

Questions that decision makers should ask the team making recommendations:
4) Could the diagnosis of the situation be overly influenced by salient analogies?
5) Have credible alternatives been considered?
6) If you had to make this decision again in a year, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now?
7) Do you know where the numbers came from?
8) Can you see a halo effect?
9) Are the people making the recommendation overly attached to past decisions?

Questions focused on evaluating the proposal:
10) Is the base case overly optimistic?
11) Is the worst case bad enough?
12) Is the recommending team overly cautious?

These questions should be used at decisions where stakes are high rather than routine decisions.

These questions gives a framework on detecting as much bias as possible and also helps us to understand the recommending team's dynamic and its members too. Being humans, it is unavoidable that we would have biases in our decisions thus I would feel that the above questions is something that most management should take note of and go through it. The only constraint that I can see from these framework is whether managers would have the capacity to adequately answer these questions.