Stories can save (or ruin) a merger

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Alan Lewis and Dan McKone state that mergers and acqui-sitions should come with an official warning: “Acquisitions can result in serious damage to your corporate health, up to and including death”. Not a surprising opinion considering a study of 2500 M&As by their firms show that more than 60 percent destroy shareholder value. This is not a sur-prising number as many other sources including a KPMG study puts the number at 83 percent.
But this does not seem to reduce the popularity of this power play among CEOs. The 2017 M&A Out-look published by EY as part of their Global Capital Confidence Barometer reports that 56 percent of CEOs expect to actively pursue mergers and acquisition in the next 12 months.
So the question is what can these CEOs do to make sure that their journeys end differently?
A collated study of the plethora of articles on reasons for failure throws up some usual suspects —inadequate due diligence, poor program mana