Recommendation
Change and development
— Netia
Netia has purchased 50 telecom companies, an astonishing pace for any company in any industry. While most of the M&A’s were small, niche-market telcos, several were larger organisations requiring significant cultural integration.
Mirek Godlewski’s, Netia CEO, shorthand way of referring to his strategy was, We want to create a ‘United States of Netia’.
SOLUTION:
The process involved TWO consulting firms: The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), responsible for delivering results ‘Above-the-Waterline’ in the operational, financial, structural domain, and Scherer Leadership International (SLI), responsible for delivering results ‘Below-the-Waterline’ (BTWL) in the human domain, applying the principles of Organization Development (OD) and/or Organization Effectiveness (OE).
We completed a unique and successful Post-Merger Integration (PMI) Process at Netia S.A., Poland’s leading alternative telecom company. One of the reasons for the success of this merger is that the Board had gone through two of our three-and-a-half-day intensive leadership retreats, deepening their relationships and experiencing a personal process of transformation, the essence of leading successful change initiatives.
From the beginning, we envisioned a small group of people selected from across functions and companies to be equipped to carry out/facilitate many of the BTWL merger interventions. The result: an Organization Effectiveness (OE) Team of 16 men and women, invited to serve for a year, receiving intense training in how to facilitate change and development. This turned out to help reduce cost and built-in a much-needed capability for the future ‘new’ company that would emerge from the Post-Merger Integration (PMI) Process.