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About This Week’s Guest

Thomas Kessler

Thomas Kessler is Partner and Managing Director of Global PMI Partners and draws on 20 years experience in Mergers & Acquisitions and particularly in Post Merger Integration. The importance of culture in transactions is one of the essential success factors.

Thomas looks at culture beyond being a success factor. In his experience culture should be a key decision factor when acquiring.

He will present his view how companies can incorporate culture during strategic selection and due diligence to ensure they are considering the impact of culture integration in the purchase decision.

His three tips for becoming more culturally competent are:

• Be open and listen actively. Take not of the others’ organisation culture; What do you see? What do people talk about? What do they celebrate? etc.
• Realize that culture is a major success factor when it comes to M&A’s. There are plenty success stories (mentioned in the interview), but unfortunately also many failures.
• Have people on board in your organisation that act as “champions“; so other people can see what they do, how they act and in this way identify themselves with the desired (new) culture.

Interview Links

Links that are mentioned in this episode:

• Email:[email protected]
• Telephone: +49 172 255 9788

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In the Culture Matters podcast, we interview real people with real stories.

Every other week there is a guest with broad international experience and lots of cultural insights. I interview real people with real stories.

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Finally

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far, and to listen to my Podcast.

I hope you will be back for the next episode of the Culture Matters Podcast!

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Chris Smit

Chris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been helping organizations save time and money when they work Internationally for the last 20+ years. While doing this he had the fortunate opportunity to hold lectures, workshops, and consulting projects on this subject World Wide. It has made him understand his own culture much better and appreciate the differences around the world.
His education is in Organisational Psychology and he has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, and currently lives in Belgium.

Chris Smit

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