Everybody knows that most mergers regularly fail to deliver the promised benefits, in fact many actually destroy value. This is especially so where there are complex clashes of corporate or national culture to take into account. And yet the potential prize of a successful operation is great, so how do you make them work? A team of the Institute of Management Development's top professors, including Jaques Horowitz, Don Marchand, Benoit Leleux and Vladimir Pucik, lead by Piero Morosini, have examined all the major elements of M&A activity to present the first academically sound but ruthlessly pragmatic guide for senior managers involved in complex cross-cultural mergers. Building on detailed studies of major mergers, including AstraZeneca, Pwc, DailerChyrsler and Aventis, the authors set out the strategic and financial issues managers need to consider at the outset of a project, including the factors that can lead senior managers in to massively overvaluing an acquisition target. The book deals with the implementation of a merger - the details where things most often go wrong.Most importantly it considers how to blend the human and social capital, where much of the potential value of a merger lies. The return of M&A ...Mergers and acquisitions - or, more prosaically, consolidation - are back on the agenda FT April 22 2002