Don’t Integrate Your Acquisitions, Partner with Them HBR Case Summary

“Don’t Integrate your Acquisitions, Partner with them”, an article written by Prashant Kale, Harbir Singh and Anand P. Raman, aims to investigate the concept of Partnering. The article was published in Harvard Business Review in December 2009, vol. 87. The 7 page long article concentrates on Merges and Acquisitions and how the acquirer treats the newly acquired organization. It is not very common that merges and acquisitions between companies succeed, and in some cases merges lead to the demise of one of the organizations involved in the operation. However, this article argues that there might be a chance to succeed when it comes to merges and acquisitions. As previously mentioned the article focuses mainly on the concept of Partnering, which is basically allowing the companies that has been taken over by other companies to operate independently.

In other words, the acquirer, instead of integrating the acquisitions into the way of doing business, they allow the acquisitions to operate in the same way it used to operate before the acquisition. Partnering involves keeping an acquisition’s separate structure and to sustaining its own identity and organization. The article also addresses the success of the concept of partnering between merging companies, where the authors provided examples of acquisitions that used the partnering technique and lead to the success and satisfaction of both organizations. Moreover, it is mentioned the terms of success of the concept of partnering. The article shows that not all organizations can adapt that concept and only companies with some compatibility are the ones that can pull it off. It is obvious that the articles main focus is to address the concept of partnering and how to succeed in implementing it.