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/