Eating the M&A Elephant
By Rob Kerr, M&A Integration Navigator at Kerr Integration
M&A Integration Command is an immersive simulation I run with leadership teams. It pressure-tests how they’d respond to the complexity of an acquisition before the real plan is written. One of the opening exercises is the Decision Dash, where teams race through 48 cards, each one representing a critical integration activity.
At a recent event, someone asked me: “But how many tasks are there in real life?”
My answer: “Often in the thousands.”
Understandably, he gulped at that.
In a complex integration, it can easily run into several thousand individual tasks. That sounds overwhelming. And it is, if you look at it all at once.
So how do you make it happen?
It’s like the old saying: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
Integration is no different. Let’s multiply M&A Integration Command by a hundred.
If there are 4,800 tasks…
Spread across 12 workstreams…
And 4 phases of delivery…
…not everything needs to be done at once. The real skill is in breaking it down, capturing the critical milestones, and focusing leadership energy on the tasks that protect and grow value fastest.
That’s why I built M&A Integration Command. It gives leaders a taste of the volume, the trade-offs, and the urgency. It shows why integration is less about doing everything all at once, and more about the right people doing the right things, at the right time.
Beyond integration teams, it also serves as a leadership training tool for people in the M&A ecosystem – from investors and advisors to in-house corporate teams who want to sharpen their judgement under pressure.
Because in the end, integration really is about eating the M&A elephant: one task, one bite, one smart decision at a time.