Interview on "M&A Stories on importance of integration management tools in M&A" with Dharmendra Singh   Show Notes:  M&A Integrations have a lot of challenges so when Dharmendra came out of a corporate job, he decided to address some of those issues. Integration processes in many organizations are not harmonized or don’t get shared between different teams. Even if there is a playbook, deployment and tracking always remain a challenge.   Integration management tools are not necessarily underrated but the industry still lacks awareness about the tool. Moreover, companies are concerned about sharing their data.    Integration management tools can be used to manage the complete lifecycle of an M&A process. Project management is one of the aspects of an integration management tool. Team collaboration, communication, and coordination are key focus areas for these tools.    On human resources in an integration project, it is good to build internal capability but at the same time, external help is required as well. But don’t treat them as external. Treat them as an extension of the internal team.   Managing integration itself is challenging. Without proper management tools, you are signing up for failure. So, watch out!  -----   Listen to this episode and learn more about what Dharmendra Singh has to say about the importance of management tools during Post-Merger Integration.   Dharmendra is a senior executive with several years of extensive global experience in the area of Corporate M&A development and software product development mainly in India, the US, and Europe. Extensive experience in formulating and articulating vision and strategy, building leadership teams. I also serve as a Chairman of the board of MergerWare and a regular speaker and panelist on VC, PE, and M&A topics at industry conferences & other events sponsored by internationally recognized associations worldwide.   https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmendrainsead/  https://www.mergerware.com/ -------  The hosts of the interview are:  Anirvan Sen, CEO Fifth Chrome: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/ Marcella Hall, HR M&A Expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarcella/ -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive".

Interview on "M&A Stories on importance of value creation and post-merger integration" with Pirita Näkkäläjärvi   Show Notes:  Getting a perspective from an M&A (pre-deal closing) practitioner on their perspective on post-merger integration.   Organizations tend to overlook the integration side of things. In fact, it is hardly given any importance in the pre-deal stage in most instances. Often only one page is dedicated for post-merger integration. New value either does not get created or the existing value gets destroyed.    Values are primarily attributed to synergies in the acquisition and usually is just a cost synergies play. It also does have revenue synergies but these types of synergies are not focused on and thus not realized.   Integrations cannot be done as a side-job or add-on to your day job. There is a lot of complexity and complications involved. It needs dedicated resources.  Managing integration alongside business-as-usual is usually challenging. This is where external help can really alleviate the competing challenges.  -----   Watch this episode and learn more about what Pirita Näkkäläjärvi has to say about Value Creation and the importance of Post-Merger Integration.  Pirita Näkkäläjärvi is an experienced M&A professional and a Member of Sámi Parliament in Finland. She has worked extensively in the areas of M&A, strategy, and communications. She has been awarded for her work both in M&A deals advisory and in Sámi-language media, and for her voluntary activities in indigenous advocacy and in folk music. She is passionate about sustainability, inclusion, and equal rights. Some of the highlights of recent years include yoiking and acting in a film presented at the Venice Biennale 2019 and taking part in the 2019 Students on Ice Arctic Expedition.   ---------  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pirita/ -------  The hosts of the interview are: Anirvan Sen, CEO Fifth Chrome: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/ Marcella Hall, HR M&A Expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarcella/ -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive".

Interview on "M&A Stories from Leadership and Cultural Perspective" with Richard A. Vincent   Show Notes:  A large number of uncertainties in M&A happen due to cultural differences e.g. when a Dutch company buys an Asian company. Leadership can define the strategy but leadership also defines the culture. How do people behave? How do people act together as a team? Do they operate in siloes or do they act as a cohesive leadership team?   Culture is usually an afterthought and most often, the effort for cultural integration is highly underestimated.    Culturally in the Netherlands, people try to do all the things themselves as a culture whereas, in Germany, they may engage external resources. In economies like Singapore, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, they regularly engage external resources.   For culture, one could use the “Competing Values Framework” of Cameron-Quinn.   One aspect of cultural difference is the difference of continents i.e. between Europe and China, India, ASEAN where the cultural differences are bigger than between countries in a region.   Watch this episode and learn more about what Richard A. Vincent has to say about Leadership and Culture in M&A transactions.   Richard A. Vincent has worked in human resources for over two decades, with extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, international HR, and in senior EMEA & APAC management roles in Executive Search, Leadership & Organizational Consulting such as Korn Ferry (Europe & Asia), PageGroup (Germany) and Robert Half (Europe & Asia). He founded RIVIONT in 2017 focusing on Leadership Advisory, Interim Management, and Executive Search solutions.  As Board Advisor I led and delivered over 500 Executive Search projects in Europe & Asia markets. Transformed, trained, coached over 50 geographical and functional leadership teams spanning 27 countries to self-awareness, effectiveness, and some of them to global top-performing teams. Advised international publicly listed and many other privately-held / private equity-backed companies.   ---------  LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardavincent/ Company : https://riviont.com/ -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome,  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/ -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive".

Interview on "M&A Stories from HR, People, and Cultural Perspective"   Show Notes: Overall 70% of M&A deals fail as per Harvard Business Review. When these deals fail, the impact of these failures tends to be in millions of dollars. They affect employees, leaders, other staff members, contractors as well as communities.    A significant number of them can be attributed to people, organization, and cultural issues. This means it is important that these issues are addressed up-front during an integration before it is too late.   People, organization, and culture risks can be put into 6 different categories:  Financial risks  Operational risks  Compliance risks  Leadership risks  Culture risks  HR functional risks   Specifically to leadership risks, during integration succession planning is often not thought through deep enough irrespective of the size of the companies involved. In good integrations, leaders do end up thinking about succession planning but not necessarily formalized them. Moreover, with succession planning even if informal, people who get identified as potential future leaders, often get strongly incentivized to stay around after the acquisition.   One fact that can’t be ignored is that there will always be people who are considered their manager’s favorite. And these people are likely to be retained by their managers, post-acquisition.   Integration leaders may review a tool called Organization Network Analysis that reviews people's connections inside the organization, see where the information flows and who are your critical influencers are.   Organizations should conduct a post diligence huddle. In the huddles, all the people who were involved in the diligence activities gather together and answer two questions:  How will we break this business when we do the integration, the way we do things?   And the second question is who should we keep on-board?   Listen to this episode and learn more about what Dr. Klint C. Kendrick has to say about HR in M&A transactions.   Dr. Klint C. Kendrick has worked in human resources for over two decades, with extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, international HR, people analytics, total rewards, workforce planning, diversity and inclusion, employee engagement, recruitment, and retention. Dr. Kendrick has worked in multiple environments, ranging from HR leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies like Oracle and Boeing to being an HR department of one for scrappy start-ups.   ---------  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klintkendrick/ HR M&A Roundtables: https://www.mandaroundtable.com/ HR Due Diligence Book: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1734958308/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ND3FBFBQHHBXJQEVZ72X  -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/  -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive".

interview on "M&A Stories from International and Cross-Cultural Acquisitions".   Understanding culture and international business practices are key to a successful cross-border M&A transaction.   In this interview, Greg Meseck shares it all on how international M&A transactions must be handled, what pitfalls must organizations be looking for, and most importantly, how you can learn from his experience to avoid these costly mistakes.    Greg Meseck is an Executive Advisor - M&A, Finance and Value-Creation Expert. In the past, he has worked with EY, Pepsico, Alvarez and Marsal, and KPMG.    In this M&A Stories, he shares perspectives on private equity (PE) linked transactions. He talks about how public company and private company acquisitions differ. And he shares his personal experience on managing trans-Atlantic acquisitions.   ----------  Greg Meseck - https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-meseck-7410925/  -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/,  and co-host is Marcell Hall - M&A Employee Experience, Expert https://www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarcella/  -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive". #fifthchrome #businessdevelopment #corporatedevelopment #mergersandacquisitions #businessleadership

Interview on "Why is Culture the biggest uncertainty in M&A Integration?".   Culture is often the biggest hurdle to conduct an M&A Integration.    But what is culture? Some people term it "the way we work here". While it may sound simple but in reality, it is a combination of several elements.    In this interview, Karunesh Prasad, Founder and CEO, Change Et Al, delves deep into what culture is and how organizations must approach cultural integration.     Show Notes:  While there are commonalities amongst integration, each M&A has its own uniqueness. Be it geography, industry, product line, there are several variables in play. These variations create uncertainties in each integration initiative.  "People", "Process", and "Culture" are different in each of integration, and within an integration, it can differ even at a P&L level. Whatever the strategic rationale of an acquisition may be, if the cultures don’t align, there will be issues with integration.  There are so many discussions and negotiations in an M&A process that often the initial rationales get sidelined.   How’s an M&A integration different from other kinds of transformations like shared services or ERP implementations? In shared services or ERP, there are one or two main sponsors like the CFO for whom the transformation is one of their main organizational objectives whereas in M&A integration, there are multiple executive leaders that are involved and it is multi-layered across the organizational vertical hierarchy.  What is culture? It translates into how decisions are made, how communications are conducted, entrepreneurship vs organizational leadership, and several other things.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to cultural integration. However, there should be a cultural integration framework. The starting point of integration needs to be an approach, short-term and long-term milestones.   It is critical to have a script for announcements and employee meetings. Do’s and Don’ts of an announcement.  How to blend internal and external resources to play to their strength and make it successful for their organization. In this interview, Karunesh bares it all on how to manage "Culture" during an integration"   ----------  Change Et Al is a change management consulting company and we created Change Et Al Academy to provide learning intervention to enable organisations to change. 4A Model of Change was created to simplify the way organizations manage change. Karunesh Prasad - https://www.linkedin.com/in/karuneshprasad/  https://www.changetal.com/  -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/  -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that enables experienced professionals to build "Future Capabilities for Business to thrive".

Video interview on "Is Artificial Intelligence really that Intelligent?".   Artificial intelligence (AI) is being touted as the biggest technology game-changer of the current times. AI is supposed to change the world around us. Whether it is healthcare, aviation, traffic or business problems, AI seems to be the answer to all. Is that really true? Or is it just another statistical technology tool to get statistical solutions? Is it just a more novel way to drive automation?   In this interview, Jasper speaks about how organizations must review their approach on AI.    Show Notes:  "Is it intelligent as human intelligence? The answer is definitely no. Is it intelligent? Absolutely." "AI is never used to its strict definition of being a self-learning artificial system. What used to be statistics is now being called artificial intelligence. Any form of automation is now being connected with AI." "AI is not magic. It is the next stage in automation." "It is not about working on a data-lake but what real business problems are being solved. Where is the work that is not optimal? Where are the repetitive tasks? What problem haven’t we been able to resolve with IT so far? And is it worth automating? " "Advice not to hire a lot of data scientists and start experimenting with technology but look at examples of what has been automated and look in the organization for the tasks that can be automated, make a list and start from there. Data scientists are technical people and by default are not business people. The biggest challenge with AI implementation is the quality of data. Machine learning requires data to learn from. "   This interview  "Anirvan in conversation with industry expert" is with Jasper Wognum, Founder and CEO, Braincreators.   Braincreators is a company that is trying to make AI accessible to all businesses, enabling them to automate recurring and hazardous tasks without having to recruit an army of data scientists or spend vast amounts of money on technology.   Jasper Wognum - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasperwognum/  https://www.braincreators.com/  -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome,  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/   Struggling with your digital strategy? Let us set up a "FREE" 30-min ideation call with Anirvan at https://calendly.com/anirvan-sen/30min  -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that advises businesses to reinvent themselves through digital innovation and get exceptional growth.

Interview on How to "manage knowledge in the 21st century using chatbots in an organization".   While chatbots are being used for a number of years, this interview focuses on KLoBot which is a Do-It-Yourself “no-code” Chatbot Builder platform. Any non-technical user can create a chatbot using KLoBot and deploy it for use on their favorite channel like Slack, Teams, SharePoint, Facebook, etc. (depending on target user audience and use case)   In this interview, Ragav speaks about how organizations can easily adopt chatbots for managing their knowledge and information sharing systems. As it is artificial intelligence (AI), KLoBots can learn very fast and can create a highly effective knowledge management system. He shares examples of how law firms, health care organizations, consulting, and technical companies, are adopting KLoBots and overcoming their bottlenecks in the knowledge sharing space. The DIY nature of KLoBot makes it really easy for companies to adopt. As long as you have a well-defined FAQ list and a good ERP/system interface, you are good to create your own chatbots.   A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct conversation or contact with a live person. This is an enabling technology that can remove repeatable, frequently queried, and low value-added tasks from an organization, and replace it with a software robot.  A highly recommended tool for mid-to-large scale companies that are looking for business and digital transformation.   This interview  "Anirvan in conversation with industry expert" is with Ragav Jagannathan, President, KL Software Technologies Inc, and Founder, KLoBot.   KLoBot Inc develops artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational user interfaces that can simplify internal and external enterprise communications, automate routine tasks, streamline business processes and provide organizational intelligence-on-demand to its users by using voice and/or text.  Ragav Jagannathan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ragav/  https://www.klobot.ai/  http://www.klstinc.com/   -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/    Struggling with your digital strategy? Let us set up a "FREE" 30-min ideation call with Anirvan at https://calendly.com/anirvan-sen/30min   -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that advises businesses to reinvent themselves through digital innovation and get exceptional growth.

Interview on How to "Catapult to the top organizational performance with process mining" techniques.   Process-mining is a process-based engineering discipline for managing, discovering, analyzing, and improving real processes by extracting information from event logs from ERPs, CRMs, and other information systems. Process mining can offer a significant number of opportunities to increase organizational, operational, and functional performances radically. Instead of the prevalent practice of pointing fingers to individuals and blame-game, process mining offers objective and fact-based insights to make informed decisions. A highly recommended tool for mid-to-large scale companies that are looking for business and digital transformation   This interview  "Anirvan in conversation with industry expert" is with Enno Kroesen, Managing Partner, ProMelius.   ProMelius focusses on the fact-based improvement of Business Processes in various industries, aided by Process Mining software, to achieve Operational Excellence.   Enno Kroesen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ennokroesen/ https://promelius.nl/   -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/    Struggling with your digital strategy? Let us set up a "FREE" 30-min ideation call with Anirvan at https://calendly.com/anirvan-sen/30min   -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that advises businesses to reinvent themselves through digital innovation and get exceptional growth.

Interview on Why Cloud computing is a must solution for businesses, no doubt on that.   Cloud computing is one of the front runners of digital transformation that is revolutionizing the business world. Enterprises are taking advantage of this highly flexible, agile, and business-enabling technology solution for all of their IT infrastructure needs. Whether you need digital storage, computing power, or temporary surge requirements, cloud computing gives you a huge array of selection. With players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft vying for attention, the competition could not be more exciting. And who gets the benefit of the competition? It is you!    This interview  "Anirvan in conversation with industry expert" is with Ajit Kumar Amit, Cloud Computing Expert | Managing Partner, Agilitics Pte. Ltd.   Agilitics Pte. Ltd. is a boutique Big Data Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Agile consulting firm, Singapore Headquartered with presence in India and the Middle East and ASEAN Countries. Agilitics Pte. Ltd. is the partner of all premium vendors of Big data and has an exclusive clientele. Our Motto is to deliver Analytics with Agility+Quality.   Ajit Kumar Amit - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akamit/  https://agilitics.sg/   -------  The host of the interview is Anirvan Sen, CEO - Fifth Chrome, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anirvansen/    Struggling with your digital strategy? Let us set up a "FREE" 30-min ideation call with Anirvan at https://calendly.com/anirvan-sen/30min   -------  This interview is part of a series run by Fifth Chrome, a firm that advises businesses to reinvent themselves through digital innovation and get exceptional growth.