Patrick -
Unfortunately, the better culture does not often win in a merger with a numerically larger orgainization. IBM people would outnumber DELL people about 10 to 1 and the DELL culture would be subsumed by IBM bureaucrats. Look at EDS, which had a very strong and dynamic culture of over 6,000 employees, when they were bought by GM, which at the time had 70,000 computer staffers. Roger Smith's intent was to have the EDS culture "infect" the GM legions but the reverse happened - the EDS people quickly lost their execution focus and within a few years, no one could find any vestige of the old EDS.
Another similar story is CPQ and DEC - the DEC staffers outnumbered the CPQ staffers by 5 to 1 and in today's CPQ, the unfocused failure prone DEC culture seems to be prevailing over the tight, hard-driving CPQ culture. Before the merger, CPQ generated well over a million dollars per employee while DEC was at about $200K per employee, a huge difference in productivity. No question that DEC had a lot of good technology but they had a lot of useless stuff too and the old CPQ ethic of sort out what works and execute on it has been replaced by the DEC method of "all you can eat product smorgasbord". Another example of the weaker but numerically superior culture subsuming the more dynamic one.
I think that an IBM / DELL merger would have exactly the same effect - the good people would leave, and the rest would learn to survive in the larger world of IBM. Net result would be maybe a slight boost for IBM and the destruction of one of the best and most focused cultures in the technology business. |
