In an acquisition where the two cultures are far apart, the same question tends to arise: who should stay, who decides what, and who knows things that are written down nowhere. That is not a question about good or bad employees. It is a question about roles, about where knowledge and decision-making power sit, and about what happens when those two things should not remain with the same person in the new organization.
It is tempting to draw up a list of names of people who are "important". That approach backfires when the cultures diverge widely, because the assumption that someone is indispensable is unrelated to the question of which role that person fulfills. A key position is a combination of three things: decision-making authority, a customer or supplier relationship, and knowledge that does not exist elsewhere in the organization. Someone can have one, two, or all three. The tool from mergerintegration.net asks, for every role in the synergy baseline, who currently fulfills that role in both organizations, and whether those two people will soon share the same role, continue to exist alongside each other, or whether one of the two will disappear.
When the two cultures are close to each other, overlap in roles is often easy to resolve: equal positions, equal expectations, a quick choice. With a large cultural difference, that is different. The same job title can be an operational role in one organization and a strategic one in the other. A product manager who handles all customer contact personally at the acquired party is a different key person than a product manager who leaves that to a team. It is therefore not enough to compare job titles; the question is what the role entails in practice, and how you keep roles clear across two organizations when the cultures are far apart deserves its own place in the Day 1 plan, not a subordinate clause.
In almost every acquisition, the same situation arises in a number of places: two people who formally or effectively fulfill the same role. That is not a flaw in the preparation, it is a normal consequence of merging two organizations. The question is not who is "better", but what the role entails in the new organization and which of the two existing interpretations comes closest to that. Sometimes the answer is that both roles continue to exist, split by customer group, region, or product line. For weighing which route fits, there is a separate elaboration on what you do when two people have the same role when the cultures are far apart.
Part of the value of an acquisition lies in knowledge that has never been recorded: how a specific customer prefers to be approached, why a process was set up a certain way years ago, which supplier is flexible and which is not. That knowledge is vulnerable in the first months after a deal, precisely the period when uncertainty about roles and the future is at its greatest. When that uncertainty lasts a long time, the risk is that the holder of that knowledge leaves before the knowledge has been transferred. That relates to the broader question why people leave in the uncertain months when the cultures are far apart, and to the practical question how you prevent knowledge from leaving with someone when the cultures are far apart. The Day 100 plan from mergerintegration.net records, per key role, which knowledge sits with that person alone, so that transfer becomes a planned step rather than a missed opportunity.
The presence of two people in a comparable role often automatically raises the question of how to merge them. That question is not always the right one. For some roles, the value lies precisely in keeping the approach, the customer contact, or the decision-making separate, especially when the two cultures differ structurally in that respect. That connects to the broader consideration of when integrating destroys value, and to the choice of what you deliberately keep separate instead of merging because it seems logical on paper. The integration office keeps track of these choices in a decision list, so that every merging of roles is an explicit decision, with a reason, rather than an automatism.
Once it is clear which roles are key positions and which knowledge is tied to them, a follow-up question arises: which part of the work in that role is tied to the person, and which part is a task that stands on its own. That distinction is useful when setting up the new organization, and it is exactly what the work scan from FTE TO AI looks at: it calculates, per task, which part of the work can be taken over by AI, regardless of who currently performs the task. For an acquisition where roles are being reorganized anyway, that is a logical moment to also ask this question.
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.