M&A: How a best-of-both culture delivers the numbers.

The premise

In M&A, value creation plans are almost always behind schedule. That is not inevitable. The acquired or merged company together can become more entrepreneurial, faster growing, and more cost disciplined at the same time. That applies whether you are a Private Equity driving an investment thesis, or a corporate acquirer integrating a business. But only if culture is deliberately designed and executed as a best-of-both system, rather than left to chance.

And crucially, this does not require endless management workshops or months of senior team distraction. It requires focus on the few cultural tensions that truly drive value delivery, and a structured, fact-driven and highly efficient way to surface and work through them.

What we observe

Every integration begins with a value creation plan. Synergies are calculated. Cost reductions are modelled. Revenue upside is projected. Operating improvements are identified. The spreadsheet looks convincing. As a strategy consultant, I have created loads of them.

What is often overlooked is that every value creation plan rests on behavioural assumptions. Assumptions about how quickly decisions will be made. Assumptions about collaboration across legacy organisations. Assumptions about accountability, speed, discipline, and innovation. If the underlying behavioural assumptions are wrong, the value creation plan becomes a spreadsheet illusion.

This is also the moment where frustration often builds, especially for investors or owners, because so much has already been done, new leadership, governance changes, external consultants, leadership coaches, and still performance remains remains plan.

Many leaders still treat culture as a moral or symbolic topic. It is not. Think of consensus in the Netherlands. It did not emerge as a philosophical preference. It was needed to fight water. In a country largely below sea level, survival required coordinated action across regions and interests. Without alignment, the sea would win. Consensus became a practical necessity before it became a cultural virtue. Values are not ornaments. They must be instrumental to your business challenges.

Values are the critical link between your strategy on paper, the way dilemmas are managed which determines business success, and daily behaviour, your real strategy in the end.

Traditional approaches often miss this. Superficial diagnostics, questions that avoid the real issues, polite middle-ground solutions for new company values where both sides dilute themselves, or one-sided dominance erode the expected performance. This is how value gets destroyed.

Our method and example

As Fons Trompenaars (and with Charles Hampden-Turner) has argued for decades, sustainable performance does not come from balancing or compromising opposites. It comes from reconciling them into virtuous cycles.

“Any value disconnected from its opposite leads to pathology.”

Every value is virtuous until it becomes isolated. The moment one side dominates and suppresses its opposite, virtue turns into vice. This is exactly what happens in M&A. The deal thesis depends on reconciling tensions, not suppressing them.

Take, for example, a financially driven, top-down organisation merging with a more people-driven, empowerment-oriented company. Predictable tensions emerge, and the value creation plan depends on reconciling them.

Decisiveness and analysis

Decisiveness without analysis becomes impulsive and unstable.

Analysis without decisiveness becomes paralysis and missed opportunity.

Strength is fast decisions grounded in deep thinking.

Empowerment and direction

Empowerment without direction creates ambiguity and drift.

Directive leadership without empowerment creates dependency and disengagement.

Strength is clear direction with real ownership.

Entrepreneurial and process

Entrepreneurial without process becomes chaos and unscalable heroics.

Process without entrepreneurship becomes bureaucracy and stagnation.

Strength is disciplined entrepreneurship.

Purpose and cost discipline

Purpose without cost discipline becomes noble but unsustainable.

Cost efficiency without purpose becomes cynical and short-term.

Strength is impact that pays for itself.

Warmth and professionalism

Warm and family-oriented without professionalism becomes avoidance and favouritism.

Professional without warmth becomes cold and transactional.

Strength is caring and demanding at the same time.

Approach

Our approach starts with a sharp diagnostic that makes the decisive cultural dilemmas explicit, the real tensions that matter. We then work with the management team in one workshop to reconcile these dilemmas by asking a different question: how can we get more of value X through value Y, and vice versa? This produces non-obvious, value-creating actions and new dual values that actually guide behaviour to effectively deal with decisive dilemmas.

The final step is translation. Often facilitated internally, teams turn these values into explicit desired and undesired behaviours and agreed corrective actions that shape everyday execution. This is where culture stops being abstract and becomes operational, fully aligned with strategy.

Result

Limited management time. Significant everyday impact. Faster execution, less friction, especially when the plan is behind and patience is running thin.

Because in the end, integration and culture are not about harmony. They are about delivering the numbers.

Invitation

If you would like to explore how this could strengthen your integration or transformation agenda, we would be glad to continue the conversation.

Read more:

Blog by Bas Kemme: Dilemma-thinking: The key to breakthrough performance and strategy execution https://www.intothenxt.com/post/dilemma-thinking-how-values-become-performance Book by Fons Trompenaars: M&A Tango: How to Reconcile Cultural Differences in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Strategic Partnerships https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/f/the-global-m-a-tango/39004453/

How a strong corporate purpose is really built

Many organizations talk about purpose. Far fewer have done the work to define it rigorously, test it, and activate it. I often comes across people inside corpoates involved in the proces who feel the right, required conversation is not taking place, often due to time pressure or other reasons. I want to help.

Because, the result is predictable. Purpose statements that sound good, but do little. Words that inspire briefly, but do not guide decisions. Initiatives that feel disconnected from a deeper reason for being.

It helps to align management on three questions:

• What is purpose?

• What does it do?

• What are the characteristics of a strong one?

Only then does it make sense to start drafting. Here's our collected experience:

What purpose is

By purpose, I mean: The meaningful positive impact the company makes on its target customers and the environment they live in.

Ambition answers what you want to achieve. Purpose answers why you exist. Values define how you behave. These three must reinforce each other. If they do not, you get strategy on paper and drift in practice.

Peter Drucker warned about this decades ago:

“That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.”

He was not talking about poetry. He was talking about performance.

What purpose does

A strong purpose is one of the most powerful drivers of intrinsic motivation. It provides direction beyond numbers. It inspires and guides decisions across product development, marketing, finance, operations, you name it.

Done well, purpose becomes a filter:

• Which initiatives fit? Which do not?

• Where do we invest disproportionally?

• What tensions, competing priorities, must we hold?
  

It also reconciles a classic dilemma: doing good versus making money.

This is not an either/or. Companies such as IKEA (“Creating a better everyday life for the many people”) or Dulux (“Let’s Colour”) show that meaningful impact and economic value can reinforce each other. When purpose builds Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem and Knowledge, it directly strengthens brand equity for both short-term (esteem, knowledge) as long-term growth potential (differentiation, relevance) . Doing good and doing well in terms of shareholder value can be reconciled. But only if purpose is built properly.

Five characteristics of a strong purpose

1. Built on an insight foundation

A strong purpose is grounded in a universal human truth and a real friction that blocks what people want. Without friction, there is no need. Without need, no compelling proposition. The friction must be tangible. It must reflect something people genuinely experience, not something the company wishes were true.

When this foundation is clear, purpose moves from abstract aspiration to meaningful impact.

2. Inside-out and authentic

Purpose cannot be invented in a workshop. It must be distilled. One route is revisiting founding intent. In one case, we pressure-tested the founder with five consecutive “whys” until we hit the irritation point, the moment where energy and conviction became visible. Another powerful route is storytelling inside the company. Ask people to describe their greatest moment at work. Then ask why that mattered. Five times. Stories reveal what surveys do not. They surface what is implicit, emotional, often unconscious. Across roles and regions, patterns begin to emerge. Purpose is rarely created from scratch. It is uncovered.

3. Outside-in and resonant

A purpose must hit a nerve. It must scratch an important itch so that people talk about the company. In a social media age, this matters disproportionately. Resonance drives brand equity, and brand equity drives growth potential.

Crucially, you do not get the necessary insight by asking people directly what they want. The most powerful insights are often implicit.

Again, storytelling helps. Collect many stories. Identify recurring themes. Extract the red thread: universal truth, friction, resulting need. Small storytelling groups generate candidate themes. Broader testing, asking which theme triggers the strongest recognition, helps select the one that truly resonates.

4. Inspiring and guiding initiatives

A strong purpose does not only sound good. It generates action. One practical test is simple: When teams brainstorm with the purpose as input, does it trigger many ideas? And are those ideas convergent rather than scattered? We have seen purpose statements fail this test. They inspired somewhat, but did not guide, ideas where all over the place. A strong purpose becomes a source of innovation across functions, not just a line on a website.

5. Activated across the company

Even a well-defined purpose fails if it remains on paper. Activation requires a structured workshop approach. A simple but powerful sequence is:

Inspire – Clarify – Apply – Commit

• Inspire through real consumer stories.

• Clarify through dialogue and exercises.

• Apply by translating purpose into concrete team implications: "What do we Start/Stop/Accelerate?"

• Commit by having teams publicly state what they will do differently.

Often, this becomes the starting point for deeper capability building.

And ultimately, as Jim Collins reminds us in Good to Great:

“Two companies can have the same core values or purpose. The authenticity, the discipline, and the consistency with which the ideology is lived, not the content of the ideology, differentiate visionary companies from the rest of the pack.”

It is not the wording that differentiates. It is the discipline.

A practical reflection

When reviewing an existing purpose statement, it helps to test it explicitly against these lenses. Is the friction clearly defined? Is it authentically rooted inside-out? Does it resonate outside-in? Does it guide initiatives?Is there a credible activation plan?

In one recent case, the friction was well defined and the statement clearly built inside-out. It inspired initiatives. But resonance outside the organization was harder to assess. That migh become the focus of the next phase. This kind of structured scrutiny is uncomfortable. It also prevents superficial alignment.

Why this takes time

Properly developing purpose across all five characteristics can take months. Six to eight is not unusual. There is often skepticism at the start, especially from financially minded leaders. And really, that is OK. In one case, a CEO agreed to “disagree and commit” to the process. Twelve months later, he concluded: “Congrats, mission completed. I never thought it was going to work.” Purpose work requires patience. But when done rigorously, it becomes one of the true foundations of performance and satisfaction at work.

Invitation

Many organizations rush purpose. They debate wording before agreeing on what purpose is meant to do. If you recognize that pattern and want to explore a more structured approach, I would be happy to continue the conversation.

Further reads:

https://hbr.org/2018/07/creating-a-purpose-driven-organization https://hbr.org/2019/09/put-purpose-at-the-core-of-your-strategy https://hbr.org/2024/03/what-successful-purpose-statements-do-differently https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-missing-link-between-purpose-and-performance/

How a strategic framework is really built

A year of executive dialogue, from

refresh to commitment

Many organizations feel busy, ambitious, and strategically active, yet strangely short on direction. That tension is not accidental.

Studies have shown that three in four employees expect their leaders to paint a compelling picture of the future, while only a tiny fraction of leadership time is actually spent on visioning. As James M. Kouzes and Barry Posner observed in Harvard Business Review, the gap between expectation and practice is striking.

When leaders do turn to vision and strategy, there is another trap. As Jim Collins once warned, many strategy statements dissolve into a muddled stew of values, goals, purposes, and aspirations that elicit a polite but deadly response: “True, but who cares?”

This article describes how a leadership team avoided both traps. What began as a limited refresh of a strategic framework turned into a year-long sequence of executive dialogues that rebuilt coherence between ambition, purpose, values, and strategy, and prepared the ground for activation.

The case is deliberately sanitized. The intent is not to showcase outcomes, but to show the process. What the work actually looked like, step by step, and why that matters.

Situation: when success creates fragmentation

Two years before the formal start of the initiative, a series of interviews with senior leaders revealed a pattern that will sound familiar to many organizations.

Three themes stood out.

First, people struggled to see a coherent overall direction. Many initiatives made sense individually, but they did not add up. As a result, leaders and teams found it hard to understand why certain things were happening and how their work contributed to the bigger picture.

Second, there was an unresolved tension between global direction and local ownership. The issue was not centralization versus decentralization, but the absence of a designed interdependence between the two.

Third, people were vocal about what was not working, yet did not see a clear way to improve it. Dissatisfaction existed without agency.

None of this reflected a lack of talent or commitment. It reflected the side effects of success over time. Strategy had grown organically. Complexity had accumulated faster than coherence.

Executive Dialogue 1

A refresh, not a reinvention

The formal journey started with a briefing involving the CEO, CHRO, and a small group of executives. The initial intent was modest: update the existing strategic framework for today’s realities, sharpen priorities, and improve embedding.

Purpose and values were assumed to be largely out of scope.

At the same time, parallel work was underway on the employee value proposition. That work was generating energy around a more emotional articulation of purpose and clearer behavioral signals. A tension was already present, even if not yet explicit.

Executive Dialogue 2

Securing mandate and agreeing how to work

Before any diagnostics or content work, the full Executive Team aligned on whether and how to proceed. This meeting was a governance moment. Leaders explicitly committed to updating the strategic framework and agreed on the approach. Parallel initiatives were acknowledged rather than ignored, including the EVP work and website refresh.

Crucially, the team agreed to test assumptions before locking scope. Purpose and values would be revisited if evidence warranted it.

Executive Dialogue 3

Listening before deciding

Two things happened in parallel.

First, a company-wide survey explored how the existing framework, purpose, and values were actually lived. Second, individual Executive Team interviews surfaced strategic reflections.

The employee input was candid.

“Purpose and values do not live in my region.”

“Our values hang on a wall, they do not live.”

“The purpose feels cold. Resonance was not tested.”

At the same time, people pointed to moments of real energy, particularly where the company’s brands connected emotionally with consumers.

Executive interviews added another layer. Ambition felt numerically clear but emotionally thin. Growth needed a clearer logic. Strategy required sharper choices.

The reaction was uncomfortable, but accepted. Two decisions followed.

Purpose and values were brought explicitly into scope. And the strategic core, where to play and how to win, would need more clarity and consequence.

Executive Dialogue 4

From insight to standards and deliberate choice

Rather than jumping to wording, the team first defined what “good” needed to look like for key elements within the strategic framework.

Values needed to help leaders solve real dilemmas, not decorate walls.

Ambition needed to inspire directionally without simulating false precision.

Strategy needed to make trade-offs visible.

Two interventions proved decisive.

First, a simple portfolio view showed where money was actually made across markets and categories. Concentration and dispersion became undeniable.

Second, the team introduced the granularity of growth framework. This was not an analytical intervention, but a deliberate structuring device to enable a more meaningful strategic conversation. It provided a common language to discuss different types of growth, different sources of value creation, and where disproportionate investment might be warranted.

At the same time, the team surfaced its key dilemmas. Not problems to be solved, but tensions to be reconciled. The logic was simple: real breakthroughs come from through-thinking, not compromise. Classic examples illustrate the point. Apple improved function through design and design through function. IKEA achieved good design through low price and low price through design.

The same lens was applied internally.

Purpose, taken seriously

Purpose deserved a pause.

As Peter Drucker famously noted, neglecting purpose is a root cause of business frustration and failure. The team therefore resisted the temptation to jump straight to wording. Instead, the work combined three lenses:

1. Inside-out authenticity, through history and founding intent.

2. Outside-in resonance, through the positive impact brands have in consumers’ lives.

3. Employee energy, through deep analysis of qualitative engagement survey responses, including answers to the question: what do you enjoy most about working here?

   
   

Patterns aligned across all three. The same human truths that resonated with consumers also gave employees pride and energy.

Purpose was not invented. It was distilled.

Executive Dialogue 5

From framework to distinctiveness

Portfolio analyses went deeper. Growth versus margin. Relative market share versus profitability. Country by country, category by category.

The discussion became specific and uncomfortable, in a productive way.

Another insight emerged through feedback from regional teams. While the granularity of growth framework was appreciated for its clarity, it risked becoming generic and overly exhaustive if translated mechanically.

The response was decisive. The team selected a limited set of strategic pillars that reflected what made the company unique. The framework became an input, not the output.

Executive Dialogue 6

Time to hash out the most difficult challenges

This was the first physical meeting, and it mattered.

Ambition was debated in earnest by looking at different ambition archetypes. For example, ambitions focused on outperforming competitors versus ambitions focused on ubiquity and reach. Each option implied very different strategic and organizational consequences. A clear ambition direction was chosen, with a working title to be refined further.

Values were approached differently. Rather than starting from wording, the team prioritized the most important dilemmas and worked through how these could be reconciled. By working through these reconciliations, a set of potential emerging values started to take shape.

The team also reviewed the global footprint across brands, categories, and markets, and agreed to start from category priorities before market prioritization.

Executive Dialogue 7

From intent to portfolio economics and disproportionate growth bets

This phase focused on shaping a global strategic growth plan.

A Pareto analysis revealed in further detail where most value was created today. Executives built realistic multi-year growth scenarios for these core product–market combinations and saw, live, how much fuel they could generate to invest elsewhere.

From there, a set of potential disproportionate growth bets was identified and handed to task forces for further assessment.

The second part of this phase focused on consolidation and usability. Strategic pillars were reduced from seven to five. For each pillar, objectives, goals, and strategies were further developed using an OGSM logic.

Remaining dilemmas were worked through, resulting in a complete set of emerging values. Executives then started to define the behaviors they would expect to see as do’s and don’ts. This proved to be a powerful test of whether the newly defined values would actually drive the desired behavior. These inputs later formed the basis for a leadership team charter.

Executive Dialogue 8

Refinement under external scrutiny

The strategic framework was reviewed with shareholders to stress-test ambition, strategic logic, and value creation. Ambition wording was sharpened. How-to-win strategies were refined. The five pillars were clarified further, without reopening fundamentals.

The framework improved without losing its essence.

Executive Dialogue 9

Locking the framework and preparing for activation

The final physical meeting focused on clarity and readiness.

The strategic growth plan was reviewed again with refined top- and bottom-line expectations, including businesses that are not globally decisive on their own but together provide meaningful fuel for future growth bets.

Purpose and ambition were refined and locked. The team explicitly separated the two, ensuring purpose remained clear and meaningful, while ambition captured aspiration.

Values were refined for global clarity and signed off. Objectives, goals, and strategies for each of the five strategic pillars were finalized.

Finally, the team returned to the employee survey conducted earlier in the year. Employee input was used to design the activation approach, shaping not only what would change, but how change would be brought to life.

Closing reflection

The project of defining the strategic framework ended here. The work did not.

What followed was all about activation across the organization and hardwiring the framework into operating processes and procedures.

This journey shows something simple, and demanding.

Strategy does not fail because leaders lack intelligence or ambition. It fails when coherence is assumed, dialogue is rushed, and activation is treated as an afterthought.

Here, coherence was built deliberately. Through sustained executive dialogue, evidence-based choice, reconciliation of real dilemmas, and continuous listening inside and outside the leadership team.

That is how a strategic framework moves from paper to practice.

Invitation

Most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of strategy, but from a lack of coherence and follow-through. If that sounds familiar and you want to explore a different way of doing the work, I’d be happy to continue the conversation.