Habits of the busiest acquirers

M&A executives at the most successful US companies understand not only how acquisitions create value but also how to enlist the support of the organization.

A thin line divides the kind of merger that nurtures a company’s growth from one that destroys value. No surprise, then, that M&A practitioners go to great lengths to tilt the odds in their favor. They hire world-class M&A teams, modify the organizational design of their companies, or add systems, tools, and processes to smooth integration and to accelerate the capture of synergies. Yet a merger’s performance over time is subject to so many variables that it’s difficult to analyze whether such moves really work.

The global business leader

Leadership has nothing to do with titles. J. Frank Brown, the Dean of INSEAD, has met a lot of CEOs in his two-and-a-half decades in business and many of them are little more than LINOs – Leaders In Name Only.
“A lot of people talk about leadership and not that many actually do it,” Brown said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge.

The Money Illusion

Consumers are commonly subject to what economists call ‘the money illusion’, whereby a consumer’s perception of the value of money is influenced by the nominal value of the currency. In other words, it’s psychologically easier for an American consumer to buy a widget for one dollar in the US than it is for that same consumer to purchase the same widget while on a trip in Vietnam for 16,000 Vietnamese dong, the equivalent of one US dollar.