General Motors was first founded in 1908, and grew through mergers and acquisitions of separate Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet businesses. On Jan. 21, 1988, a senior General Motors executive, Elmer Johnson, wrote a memo which accurately anticipated GM's key challenge in transforming the company: “We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” After 80 years, those businesses still struggled to work together.

One of GM's synergy initiatives focused upon consolidating and standardizing support for IT resources. To achieve this goal, GM utilized Electronic Data Systems (a part of GM from 1984 to 1996). Although one of EDS's primary goals during this period was to 'moving the automaker onto a common supply-chain tracking system', after considerable efforts, and nearly 10 years of escalating resource commitments, this goal continued to escape them. Despite this, EDS continued to provide significant IT services in a follow-up contract in excess of $1B dollars.

While the 'rigidities' which Johnson spoke of are just one of many contributing factors of GM's recent bankruptcy, the unsuccessful efforts of GM's efforts to realize its synergy initiative outcomes, after several decades of effort, shows how elusive such goals can be, despite the best efforts of its leaders, the generous allocation of precious resources, and the ever-present threat of market competition. Synergy, it seems, is both difficult to capture, and complicated to abandon, once you have committed to it as a strategy.

If we step back and consider all of the constraints that have been identified in the articles in this series, they can be categorized into 3 themes: team-oriented issues, technical issues, and time-based issues. Team issues include the skills, preferences, and desire for equity on the part of the respective stakeholders in making the best possible decisions to benefit the common good. Technical issues include challenges such as finding and developing sufficient value, functionality, reliability, and capacity to meet user needs, and delivering those capabilities with operational excellence within available funding and a new business and technical architecture. Finally, time issues include the need for delivering products and services within committed schedules, responding to new requests in a timely fashion, and performing needed customer-specific customizations when needed. Such goals must be openly identified, responsibly addressed (with commitments or careful refinements so they can be committed to), and their solutions must be effectively communicated, or the user communities for a synergy initiative may be left with the impression that things are going to get worse, rather than better, under the initiative's new approaches to performing work.

I know an individual who worked for GM as a summer intern, during the early 1990s. He summarized his experiences this way:

"Each GM division operated independently of all of the others, and cooperation was not in their DNA. They hated each other. My job, as an intern, was to try to coordinate across these divisions, and suggest ideas for sharing and working together towards common solutions. But what I found, in performing that coordination, was an intense distrust of each other... they said things like 'Why would I want to use something they built', regarding another division.

But the effort did ironically achieve one thing. My project gave them an opportunity to finally work together in one unfortunate outcome. My efforts at collaboration became a rallying point for all of the divisions, as the one thing they could finally agree on was that they all hated me!"

This anecdote gets to the heart of a key enabler for achieving business results from synergy-based initiatives, which is the issue of trust. Groups must trust that the goals of the synergy efforts are reasonable, that systemic constraints which prevent progress will be addressed by their leadership, and that the targetted benefits will be worthwhile. Sponsors must trust that participants will pursue legitimate improvements in reasonable ways, and find the benefits that are actually harvested acceptable. Studies indicate that such trust-based cultures, which favor the practical application of wisdom over rule-based approaches, will be considerably more efficient than alternative efforts to control undesirable behaviors through rule-making. But such trust can take a long time to build, and only a moment to erode. Trust-based communities do not lack order, but rather strike the right balance for achieving 'just enough' structure through community-adopted principles, proven and well supported best practices which embody those principles, and disciplined operations within an agreed-to execution framework. Such a framework can ensure that the lessons from such initiatives are meaningfully captured, shared, and exploited over time.

The following guidelines may serve to guide such efforts. While the guidelines are ordered, it is expected that the activities, teams, and decisions which would be necessary to implement them will need to be iterative, overlapping, and adaptive, as experience from applying this guidance is captured, considered, and rationalized over time:

1. Clearly define the focus, value proposition, targets, and timing of the initiative

   An initiative must have a clear purpose, and that purpose should be to solve a particular set of problems, or to enhance a well understood set of value propositions. The successful sources of recovering value from mergers and acquisitions are well defined; if business targets presume that more value than this can be recovered from these sources, the effort should only move forward with this being recognized as a significant risk.

   Defining and communicating this purpose may be the single most important ingredient for a successful initiative. An initiative may chose the wrong purpose, be overly ambitious in its reach, or find it difficult to translate a purpose into action. But a clear purpose helps to scope potential activities, and allows initiative participants to ask questions that reveal whether a particular project is useful for solving the problem under consideration. And a specific timeframe provides important information that bounds both the availability of investment funds and the expectations of when payoffs will need to be realized. The art of crafting such an initiative is knowing (and being able to negotiate) how to draw these boundaries. This purpose and timing information acts as the knife, providing the differentiating criterion about what should be in, and what should be out, so that only the most important features required to achieve the designated purposes remain. The purpose should not be to create synergy (as this would confuse the means with the desired end state), but rather to implement a tangible vision and objectives for a specific product or project attributes or performance characteristics of the organization. These should be immediately translatable into business requirements, which are a crucial part of conversations for any synergy initiative. These business requirements should be defined in clear and unambiguous terms, for specific customers.

   As Goold and Campbell suggest, "The goals of synergy programs tend to be expressed in broad, vague terms: "sharing best practices," "coordinating customer relationships," "cross-fertilizing ideas." In addition to cutting off debate (who, after all, wants to argue against sharing such fuzzy language obscures rather than clarifies the real costs and benefits of the programs) it also tends to undermine implementation, leading to scattershot, unfocused efforts as different parties impose their own views about what needs to be done to reach the imprecisely stated goals."

   Instead, individual projects "should strive to be as precise as possible about both the type of synergy being sought and its ultimate payoff for the company. Overarching goals should be disaggregated into discrete, well-defined benefits, and then each benefit should be subjected to hard-nosed financial analysis... Once the overall synergy goal has been broken down into its main components, the next step should be to estimate the size of the net benefit in each area. Uncertainties about both the costs and the benefits, however, often lead executives to avoid this obvious task. But without some concrete sense of the payoff, the decision maker will be forced to act on instinct rather than reason.

   It is thus important that a target time frame and launch customer(s) be identified for the initiative, so that relationships can be established with those customers. These customers must provide commitments to the products of the initiative so the need for the business benefits which the initiative intends to deliver can be substantiated. Without these commitments and focus, it is far too easy to speculate on too wide a range of possible solutions, and have too little attention paid on focusing on the 'precious few' that will provide the best possible value within the available time. It is a rare for resources to be available to pursue anything but the highest priority targets. Once credibility is established by demonstrating that such targets can be achieved, follow-on investments can then be secured to address additional priorities."

2. Validate that the preconditions for achieving successful synergy are actually in place

   Assess the required conditions for synergy, as described in the opening article of this series. If gaps exist, develop effective mitigation plans to address those gaps, implement those plans, and follow a closed-loop corrective action process to track issues with those plans until plans are fully implemented and all outstanding issues are closed..

3. Secure roles, responsibilities, and commitments from all organizations involved in realizing the initiative's benefits

   Any change involves elements of development, deployment, and recurring support. As the details of changes are elaborated, and decisions about them are accomplished, both the change agents and the units being changed need to be able to communicate and cooperate throughout a coherent design process. Such involvement requires the sustained time commitments of people with the right knowledge (or access to it), which can typically only be achieved when those commitments are established within an agreed to period of performance, and within a defined set of responsibilities. In the absence of such infrastructure, decisions will still be made, but the quality of those decisions will usually be adversely affected, causing subsequent technical debt.

4. Detail the configuration baselines to sustain, improve, and grow the business concurrently with the synergy development efforts

   It is hard to dispute that context matters in any improvement activity. Once an initiative begins, it will become increasingly difficult to track the extent to which its purpose is being satisfied, if there is not a controlled baseline to work from. This is because businesses are dynamic organisms, and their statements of work, ways, and means are constantly interacting and evolving. While it may not be necessary for stakeholders in some situations to substantiate how much or when improvements have actually been realized, or when a net return on investments has actually occurred, it will be necessary to continue to perform the mission of the organization, even as it is being transformed. For this reason, baselines of all contracts, regulations, agreements, processes, roles, people, projects, and assets will need to be captured and made available for analysis, categorization, and review. Ultimately, responsibility for rationalizing such variation needs to be allocated to responsible agents, so common approaches can be crafted for the patterns which emerge.

   As these means to achieve the organizational ends are cataloged, one of the key factors to analyze is how decision-making is performed, and in particular, if perceived control mechanisms that are in place are effective or an illusion. By exploring the roles, responsibilities, accountability, and authority involved in such decision-making, it can become clear where the power is within organizations, and whether the right decisions are being made at the right levels. Through such explorations, the terminology used within various organizations should also be documented, and two trends will likely be noticed. Different groups will use different terms to describe similar things (which is a relatively easy thing to fix). Unfortunately, different groups also often use the same term to discuss quite different things. As a result, each configuration baseline should include, and maintain under change management, a glossary of key terms, and their current and target meanings in practice.

   The information developed from these business snapshots should provide a means for considering alternative consolidation approaches, organizational structures, and service delivery models with respect to this inventory, and for analyzing their impact on current and future team organizations and members, customers, deliverables, cost recovery / transfer methods, and policy and regulatory compliance. Such an analysis capability allows the type of meaningful review of alternatives that leads to better decision-making.

5. Quantify and model measures of effectiveness for projects and the initiative overall under different scenarios

   Estimates of benefits which may be realized under the above alternative scenarios should form the basis for accountability, and enable tradeoffs to be made between investment alternatives. The estimates performed in this context will nearly always have wide variation, since much of the work may be unprecedented or will need to be done under unfamiliar conditions. Despite this, by establishing the basis of estimates for accountability through well-defined measures of effectiveness, estimating factors can provide an important context for considering alternatives for performing the work, establishing important contingency for risks, and providing a means of tracking progress against overall objectives. Typically, such measures should include customer satisfaction criteria, and should emphasize the quality of deliverables, rather than just tracking the passage of time or the consumption of budget alone. A financial model of the business should be available to allow various options to be traded off (time, labor, capital, raw materials) under different scenarios by separate groups, and enable consideration of these alternatives and their impact to the business's future financials.

6. Establish a robust and efficient organizational architecture for ongoing operations and support of the integrated capabilities, and launch projects to improve those capabilities where necessary

   The structure, interfaces, and flow of information through the 'to-be' organizational entities should be well documented. The scalability and performance of the resulting collection of organization will be a direct consequence of this structure, and the robustness and maturity of the components and interfaces which make it up. A well-designed organizational architecture will be more efficient because the coupling between units will be streamlined, the cohesion within units will be enhanced, and the scalability and ease of change over time for the overall system will be improved. In some situations, it may be necessary to have a family of cooperating architectures (as opposed to different views of one coherent architecture), since these separate architectures may each be driven by unique drivers within their business scope and customer engagement models, or may have carry-over support arising from legacy situations. When this is the case, a commitment should be secured to rationalize these over time in support of initiative goals.

   As the book Beautiful Architectures indicates:

   "In the face of increasing complexity of systems and their interactions, both internally and with each other, an architecture comprising a set of structures provides the primary means for dealing with complexity in order to ensure that the resulting system has the required properties. Structures provide ways to understand the system as sets of interacting components...

   Good architects don't construct their designs by ad-hoc, brute force means, and they certainly try to avoid clumsy hacks. In response to the complex demands of site and context, climate, the activities to be accommodated, supply chains of materials and components, construction processes, and budgets, they design commensurately varied and complex buildings. But they try to do this with conceptual elegance - following principles of economy of means, and rigorously applying their own version of Occam's Razor. Underlying the apparent variety and complexity of beautiful works of architecture, then, you can usually discover some simple, elegant principles of functional organization and formal order. Discovering these principles takes intellectual engagement—which is a crucial part of the experience and pleasure of architecture."

   As noted, such architectures don't just happen, especially in organizations. Such architectures must thus consider key design drivers such as required throughput, failure modes, and interfaces; the required structure may not always be obvious, nor the requirements for the underlying functions evident. But the resulting decisions can have impacts far beyond what is originally anticipated. As The Big Switch notes,

   "With the electric grid, we've always known precisely where to place the socket. It goes between the point where the current is generated and the point where the current is applied to do something useful. The utilities themselves have just two roles, both clearly delineated: they produce electricity and they distribute it...

   All the applications of the electricity are the responsibility not of the utilities but of the utilities' customers. Because the applications are carried out by physical appliances, they can't be delivered over the network from remote sites. Running a vacuum cleaner in a power plant wouldn't help to clean the rugs in your home. The clear divide between electricity's generating infrastructure and it applications - a divide made manifest in the electrical socket - makes the utility model relatively simple when it comes to electric power. Electricity's complexities lie in its applications, and those applications lie outside the sphere of the utility."

   Similarly, one key to establishing an appropriate organizational architecture is in defining well-defined 'sockets' that provide an insulation and conversion function with external processes, and with the users of provided services. Such functions can minimize the need for customers to produce special 'adapters' themselves, enables the organization to improve their ability to perform customization where necessary, and allows a focus on unwarranted variation for such interfaces. International business travelers are all familiar with the need to carry specialized power adapters for many different countries. If individual projects, customers, or capabilities are required to invent their own set of customized interfaces on a case by case basis for synergy initiatives, the resulting inefficiencies will frustrate everyone. Additionally, the 'functions' of the architecture will need to be performed by organizations, and roles within those organizations. The mission, authority, and statements of work for each of those elements should be well defined, verified by critical stakeholders, available in a standardized location and format, and managed under change control.

   Interface control definitions will generally only be reliable when developed through a rigorous data modeling effort which produces a clear, concise, and unambiguous data dictionary, which is subjected to meaningful reviews. These descriptions provide essential definitions of the form, state, frequency, volume, and exceptions processing requirements and partitioning of the architecture. They represent a contractual agreement between producers and consumers on what is being exchanged. Without such information, integration will be difficult to achieve, as there will be no basis for determining how things are supposed to work, or when things are 'done'. As a result, the 'inner workings' of groups tend to be exposed to the broader organization, which can cause unnecessary coupling with those approaches over time, and lead to less flexibility in evolving these approaches over time.

   When managing capabilities, there is a substantial difference between performing integration (forcing things to fit together) and achieving interoperability (enabling smooth and efficient operation). Integration is the act of making two systems work together to achieve a functional goal, regardless of how difficult or expensive that might be. Interoperability is a measure of how easy integration between two systems is to achieve. The technical and business architectures should strive for interoperability, rather than just integration.

7. Identify and monitor the status of critical implementation requirements and milestones for business continuity and change roll-outs

   At some point, each initiative must transition from development activities to operations activities. Since most initiatives of significance are developed and rolled out in a phased fashion, these activities likely overlap with each other. As a result, the need for business continuity planning is quite important. The need for this is not for assuring that disasters can be recovered from, as it is with equivalent IT-related planning. Instead, this need is to ensure that the business entities which are involved in transitioning from 'pre-merger' to 'post-merger' work can make this transition without disrupting current operations. This typically involves defining a detailed, right-to-left schedule of critical transition events that will be necessary for all affected units of the new organization to continue operation. From day one, processes must continue to work, but may only be valid if they are modified. Projects must continue to move forward, even though accountability and review milestones for those projects may need to shift. Roles and responsibilities, communications channels, and meeting architectures must be updated so that they are aligned with process and organizational adjustments. Budget authorization and tracking may need to be adjusted to account for a new cost basis in the updated organization. Even something as seemingly trivial as distribution lists may need to be updated. A mapping of all baseline information from step #2 above should also be performed, and reviewed to confirm that the targeted functions and requirements are all accommodated by the requirements and architecture, and aligned with appropriately scoped implementation projects in the go-forward plan. Finally, all of this infrastructure must be designed, implemented, verified, communicated, and supported from 'day one', and must 'play together'. Unless the underlying changes are relatively minor, this can be an enormous task, especially if the magnitude or nature of these changes is large. Thus, having one or more design and production readiness reviews of this infrastructure, with affected stakeholders, is a very prudent action, to ensure that the requirements and objectives of the initiative will be achievable within the target time frame

8. Define and deploy a robust governance approach for managing projects being managed under the initiative 

   An organization's governance is the policies and processes that define expectations, grant power, and enable accountability for operations. As such, governance is among the most critical rule-making that an organization will do in designing its structure, organizing its functions, and allocating its resources. When merging two or more previous independent governance systems, this can be a tricky business, as prior functionality and compliance with upstream and downstream processes will likely need to be retained, and the ability to streamline transactions with the corresponding agents must be preserved. Projects must thus simultaneously be actively transforming to the future production system of its business, while continuing to simultaneously use both its prior and current generations of guidance for how work is to be done. This likely will require unprecedented levels of coordination and discipline on planning and managing by processes within the merged organization. This will be especially true when key regulatory certifications or qualifications are at play.

   Cheerleading can play an important role in helping to facilitate the required changes, but is no substitute for people being able to roll up their sleeves, and having the time to perform the hard work of change in an organized fashion. A careful balance between structure and autonomy is also required, since due to the span and scope of affected organizations, it can be very difficult to centrally manage all such changes across a complex set of diverse businesses. Any synergy initiative must navigate this challenge and somehow carefully manage the resulting opportunities with 'just enough' planning, tracking, and reporting. Just enough, though, doesn't suggest 'informal' or 'undocumented', but instead for flexibility in approaches, and improved delegation and accountability, without adding non-value-added layers of bureacracy. The following outlines several of the critical practices that should be useful in organizing that work.

   1. Establish a workflow for projects (both ongoing, opportunities, and risks)

      A standard set of decision gates need to be put in place for initiatives to track progress, coordinate decision-making, and assure that required quality criteria are being satisfied for the evolving work in process. The owners, reporting channels, and communications templates for those projects should be defined and training should be provided to those who must implement that reporting. Project states which should be tracked through this workflow include identification, analysis, authorization to proceed, development, validation, deployment, and support. Unless all of these aspects are estimated (both time and resources) and planned, decisions and commitments about related investments and resources may be wasteful, or require painful rework. The criteria for transitioning from one state to another in this workflow must be rigorous, to ensure that activities are quality-driven, rather than schedule-driven.

   2. Organize communities of practice to explore and commit to pursuit of opportunities and benefits within designated domains

      If 90% of politics is local, so are 90% of initiatives. In any complex business, there will many different areas (domains) in which the potential benefits of synergy can be evaluated. Different areas will be able to engage at different levels, depending upon their existing portfolios of business, architecture, and available talent. This is why the initiative's purpose is so critical. If local groups find the rationale for the initiative compellling and the expectations reasonable (though challenging), they will be likely to strike an appropriate balance in giving attention to both current operations and initiative goals. If these conditions are not satisfied, studies indicate they are more likely to try to take shortcuts, and to spin the results.

   3. Establish standards for implementation after analyzing the similarities and differences of alternative solutions

      As communities of practice have time to interact, it will likely become apparent that they have taken alternative approaches to specific situations in the past. Some of these differences will be necessary for business or technical reasons, and others may not be. The trick, of course, is figuring out which is which. This can be quite challenging, if there are fundamental conflicts in business models (such as when one area is motivated to compete for cost-plus contracts, and another must perform on a fixed price contract basis).

   4. Evaluate, prioritize, and initiate action on the best ideas

      A means of filtering through candidate opportunities and identifying those with the most business value should be identified. Progress will likely be resource-limited, rather than idea-limited. Deciding what levels of resource commitments are 'affordable', where and when to make these investments, and the degree to which payoffs from benefits can be reinvested, all require a robust communications and decision-making infrastructure which transparently and effectively communicates the resulting decisions to affected stakeholders, and provides a means of reviewing and updating such decisions where appropriate.

      Opportunities should be considered against a standardized set of decision-making criteria, and should only be pursued, if all such criteria are satisfied, such as:

      • Is the opportunity realistic in scope, reach, and timeframe?
      • Is the end state capability clearly achievable, within available resources, mature technologies, and with proper attention to potential risks?
      • Is the fiscal, time, and workforce investment worth it, relative to other demands on our team?
   5. Perform technical due diligence on incoming responsibility areas

      The elements of an expanded portfolio in a synergy-related organizational merger are not likely to be of uniform quality or business value. In view of this, it is recommended that leadership adopt some means of assessing and addressing gaps between acceptable practices and current approaches. The sooner that any such problems are uncovered, the better positioned the organization will be to address them, and to take advantage of their disposition. The responsibilities for performing the associated reviews, and who will take required follow-up actions, should be clearly defined.

   6. Conduct detailed implementation planning

      Groups working on the projects for the initiative should have a standard planning approach, reporting structure, communications deck, and infrastructure for reporting provided to them, with assurances that this approach will be 'locked down' for defined periods of performance (such as quarterly), so that teams are not spending their time chasing new ideas. A blockpoint update cycle for these methods should be integrated into the organization's overall planning calendar. There must be clear ownership and commitment to continuous improvement for these methods, so that the planning approaches are refined with time.

9. Fund, staff, launch and monitor improvement efforts

   Improvement teams should have clear reporting channels, focused 'launch customers', and well understood mid-term and final exams. But in many situations, the funding available for improvement efforts may be extremely limited. Peter Drucker suggested that there are three key elements of managing improvement: 1) analyzing opportunities for improvement and developing an understanding of their costs, 2) committing resources to the most promising opportunities, and 3) when investments do not achieve desired results, deciding which should receive more resources and which are better to be abandoned (the most difficult part). Too often, leaders do not weigh the relative benefits of activities so ineffective ones are de-emphasized in order to invest in more promising ones; instead, due to political pressures, they may reduce every activity by equal percentage in a node to 'fairness'. A Harvard Business School study of successful patterns of improvement within resource-constrained educational efforts identified effective filtering criteria for such top-down efforts. They should be engaged when:

   • The cost of an opportunity that will benefit the whole organization is larger than the budget authority of frontline or middle managers
   • Current stakeholders and customers like things as they are and therefore have few incentives to provide additional resources for improvements
   • Reducing funding of existing activities is required, but incentives encourage decentralized decision-makers to continue funding them anyway

   In the face of such situations, several key points deserve special focus

   1. Each strategy element should have a credible budget and staffing plan. If it is not, you don’t really have a strategy.
   2. The idea that 'decentralization is the answer to everything' is not really an answer, but an excuse
   3. If your resource allocation strategy requires you to steal fromm the rich to feed the poor, don’t alienate those whose pockets you
      are stealing from. Eventually, you will run out of other people’s money.
10. Actively manage the risks and issues associated with implementation

    Risks should be captured at multiple levels, scrubbed ruthlessly so that senior management's attention is not distracted on relatively unimportant details, and have contingency allocations of resources and finances available to them, for the inevitable situations in which mitigations are impractical, or are necessary and available, but constrained by local factors.

11. Conduct periodic lessons learned reviews, and using that information to refine methods and approaches

    After-action reviews and knowledge management must be institutionalized within the initiative, since the approaches which are taken will be imperfect and will require refinement with time.

Turning one final time to Goold and Campbell, their cautions regarding the need for a disciplined, and cautious approach, such as outlined above, deserve emphasis:

Such an approach will help executives avoid wasting precious resources on synergy programs that are unlikely to succeed. Perhaps even more important, it will enable them to better understand where the true synergy opportunities lie in their organizations. We believe that synergy can provide a big boost to the bottom line of most large companies. The challenge is to separate the real opportunities from the illusions. With a more disciplined approach, executives can realize greater value from synergy-even while pursuing fewer initiatives.... When a synergy program founders, it is usually the business units that take the blame. Corporate executives chalk the failure up to line managers' recalcitrance or incompetence. We have found, however, that the blame is frequently misplaced. The true cause more often lies in the thinking of the corporate executives themselves...

When uncertainty is high, we recommend that corporate executives proceed cautiously. Rather than intervene decisively, they should encourage further exploration. The mechanisms for exploration may be similar to those for implementation pilot projects, fact-finding visits, temporary assignments and task forces, forums for sharing ideas but they are very different in intent. An exploratory mechanism is designed simply to collect facts. The end result is a better-informed decision maker. In implementation mode, by contrast, the intention is to change the way managers are working or thinking. Sometimes, the best course will be to do nothing. The opportunity may be too small to justify the expenditure of management time, there may be no clear reason for the parent to intervene, or the risks may be too high...

The thought of doing nothing will, of course, make many executives distinctly uncomfortable. After all, it goes against the grain of the most basic managerial instincts: to take action, to get things done, to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Yet executives who are not prepared to countenance a do-nothing outcome should ask themselves whether they are in the throes of biased thinking. If convinced that the benefit is sizable and the parenting opportunity real, executives can then search for the best kind of corporate intervention...

When synergy is well managed, it can be a boon, creating additional value with existing resources. But when it's poorly managed, it can undermine an organization's confidence and erode the trust among business units as well as between the units and the corporate center. Synergy's upsides are real, but so are its downsides. And the only way for managers to avoid the downsides is to rid themselves of the biases that cloud their thinking. When it comes to synergy, executives would be wise to heed the physicians' creed: First, do no harm.

Achieving the economic ends of businesses through synergy has remarkable similarities to attempts at the economic development of nations. The environment must be right. Sufficient time and patience must be available for the cultures to adjust. Finally, there must be sufficient will, belief, and wherewithall to accomplish the necessary transformations. If all these ingredients are in place, and the constraints and risks of synergy are effectively managed, I would only add the following to the above wisdom: Proceed with caution, provide enough buffer that you will be able to recover from the inevitable, unforseen problems, and provide enough structure that you can build upon your successes.