OST in a merger situation

Harrison Owen owenhh at mindspring.com
Tue Jun 5 06:46:19 PDT 2001


At 11:42 PM 6/4/01 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi all.
>I am having a dialogue with a (maybe) client. He would like to have som
>examples of where OST has been used in merger situations. The company
>concearned has recently merged with two other companies. So far I only
>talked to the manager of the salesdepartment, about doing OST for the three
>salesdepartments. We did however talk about the whole company (160
>employed)as well. The company is within marketing/sales/e-business/customer
>relations and so on.

OS is wonderful in a merger situation. Two stories. Corporate Express is an
American company in the office supply business. When I first met them (in
September several years ago) they were doing $100,000,000.  By October it
was $300 million, by November it was $600, and by the first of the year, $1
Billion (actually a little less  -- but when you get that close you can
exaggerate a little.)  All this was done by merger/acquisition and each
time they added a major piece, we did another Open Space with all the more
or less senior folks involved. In a couple days, they managed to deal with
a lot of nitty-gritty stuff like product rationalization, compensation,
regional advertising, etc. But most of all they established the "people"
network so they could really work together more quickly. Second Story The
ACCOR Group -- French  hotel company which started out as Novitel, Sofitel
-- but they grew to include Pullman, Motel 6, Wagon-lit and more. The issue
was maintaining brand identity while building corporate identity in a
multi-cultural, multi-national environment. And Open Space was a
significant part of the answer. Christopher Schoch was my partner in crime,
and he tells the tale in some detail in "Tales from Open Space." a copy of
which you may obtain for free by visiting www.openspaceworld.com  click on
"papers" and scroll down to "Tales" -- It's the whole book. Enjoy.

Harrison


>Harrison Owen

7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, MD 20854 USA
phone 301-469-9269
fax 301-983-9314
Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website www.mindspring.com/~owenhh

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