Monday 7 July 2008

Aquisitions, in reverse

Isn't it funny how you hear about your company buying another massive company and the initial though is always, "Hey, wow, that's great we get to increase the size of our business" 6 months later all of your managers are redundant and the management of this new company is running your section. I've made a name for this, though if anyone actually reads this stuff then perhaps they can give me a more well known name. I call it, "The reverse, non-hostile, takeover". It actually makes a lot of sense now that I've seen my organisation do it twice. The process is like this. 1. Identify something that the company is not doing well. Be it HR, or print solutions, or development or whatever. 2. Identify other companies that do it very well. 3. Identify which of these is ripe for aquisition. 4. Aquire. 5. Replace those responsible for that process in your company with those from the new company. 6. See your company start doing it better. Ok so I might have over simplified it a little, but that's the general gist of it. The first time it was very successful, we took on a compan that did HR much better than us and our Morale in general 3 years later is significantly higher and HR is run better. Now we have another aquisition going. It so far has given me lots of extra work and new projects but my new management is now the management of this company we bought. While it's good that we're getting all this new work, the progression path for my career is feeling a little bit stunted seeing all the upper level management that I knew being replaced with people who don't know me from a bar of soap. Feels a bit like I've got to start again. Never the less, it'll prove an exciting year one way or another.