Strategy is all about choice. At its foundation, business strategy comes down to decisive prioritization of what your organization will and won’t do in order to achieve its desired goals and outcomes. Landing on the choices and priorities that underpin any strategy requires insights inherently formed by a number of factors including the integration of competitive intelligence, which in our experience is often neglected or even discredited.

Beyond upgrading and reducing redundancies of an IT Infrastructure that is outdated, incorporating any (or all, if appropriate) of our recommended foundational areas into your IT infrastructure-layer strategy promises greater agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security, while also helping your business deliver on its down-selected imperatives.

Let’s assume you’ve worked through your strategic imperatives with decisive prioritization, calling out what you clearly will and will not invest in for the next 12-18 months, as part of your 3-year (+) aspirations. From those few decisive strategic imperatives, you have an execution mandate for both in-year initiatives and multi-year executions. Typically, at least a portion of those imperatives requires significant changes or new processes within your operations.

Newly merged cultures have the very real potential to negatively impact employee morale, stymie collaboration, and far worse, diminish the quality of employee interactions with customers, vendors, and others outside the organization, impacting business results. So why is merging corporate cultures more challenging today than it’s ever been?

In his 2 part article, HPA Senior Advisor, Alex Nesbitt, explores the inherent complexities of roll-up mergers and discusses potential solutions to drive value in one of the most successful business growth models historically.
Part 1: Why Roll-Ups Succeed or Fail
Part 2: Secrets to Success in Industry Roll-Ups

HPA Senior Advisor Alex Nesbitt’s valuable insight on extension mergers continues. Read Part 2 here.

Many of you know of my deep admiration for all things Berkshire Hathaway, including for Chairman and CEO, Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman, Charlie Munger. Over the past several years, I’ve spent a likely unreasonable amount of time thinking about BRK and I’m profoundly committed to understanding how it makes so (so so) much money, and what might be next for them.

Extension mergers, often referred to as roll-ups, have historically been one of the most successful business growth models. Whether pursued to extend geography, markets, products, or some combination of these, such mergers focus primarily on revenue synergies. They have fueled impressive growth for companies like Cisco and IBM, who have used their extensive sales and distribution networks to, in turn, drive sales of products from hundreds of small acquisitions.

Simplifying and thereby becoming more strategic with your IT is a multi-year, enterprise-wide effort that incorporates standardization, optimization, automation, and, as appropriate, virtualization and cloud migration of an organization’s infrastructure, application, and business process layers. The goal is to boost performance efficiently while mitigating compliance and security risks, facilitating new strategic capabilities, and freeing up budget for more strategic spending.

Obtaining organizational buy-in for major transitions in any organization is a Herculean endeavor, but it can be achieved with a thoughtful approach that considers many factors, including change definition to bi-directional dialogue,  multi-faceted guiding coalitions and communications leads, and incentives. Before you take on the next major change effort, consider these elements.