Your newly emerging company should start with the capabilities it has been developing and then apply all six of the key springboards during integration implementation to transform it into a high performance, quantum leap company.

The six springboards are:

1.  Customer strategy and branding: The new customer strategy should outline how your company will provide value to the different segments of your customer base.  The brand promise defines the targeted customer experience.

2.  Company strategy: The purpose of your company strategy is to make sure that the organizational structure and processes you have put in place can best realize your overall business and customer strategy goals.

3.  Integrating culture and leadership principles: To integrate the culture of your newly combined company you need to align the values that underpin the culture of the two companies before they combined.  The reconciled values define the new cultural principles and leadership expectations, in line with the vision of your new company.

4.  Integrating knowledge insights and business principles: As part of the integration process, it is important that you combine and reshape the bet knowledge and insights of both the acquiring and acquired companies to form an integrated set of business principles.

5.  People strategy: The purpose of a people strategy is to select and retain the best people from the two existing companies for roles in your newly combined company.

6.  Information technology and systems: The goal in an integration of information technology and supporting systems is to design your new company’s information architecture based on what your new company is seeking to achieve.

Using these springboards effectively provides the thrust to move the integration forward much more rapidly and effectively.  Springboards enable you to work through and attack potentially paralyzing issues and areas, while at the same time energizing the people and the emerging structure of your new company.

Planning and then taking action to become a high-performance company strongly contrasts with what most often happens after acquisitions.  Instead of moving to a higher level of value creation, too many newly integrated companies end up performing at the lowest common denominator of the two previous companies.

In most of these cases, the primary gain is in sheer bulk, in terms of more customers, more distribution channels, more products, and more overall revenue.  However, bulking up does not necessarily go hand in hand with achieving high performance.  Enhanced bulk may help a company gain a higher market share, but it is another thing to transform a company from one that is simply bigger to one that performs better.   Instead a frequent outcome is that the increased bulk results in a clumsy, plodding company with a slower response time than it had before it acquired the new company.

Here is the formula for how each of the six springboards can help your company reach a higher level of performance.

Capabilities + Springboards = Quantum Leap Performance Outcomes

The next series of blogs will explore each of these six springboards.