The automatic pilot thinking during a merger says: lets take the best of company A and the best of company B to create the new company C. The small detail is that the best of A plus the best of B may not be good enough for C. To put it unkindly, the sum of the two “best” may still be crap! The focus should be: what the new C should look like? By all means, let’s take any goodness from anywhere where available, but here you’ll have (usually) an opportunity to build something above and beyond the past. If we don’t realise that, we may settle for an ‘obvious’ (and easier) common denominator, and this does not make it automatically good. Ok, it’s harder to think this way, I admit. Also, I would bet my money that, in 9 out of 10 cases, a resulting ‘C hybrid best + best’ is not a good idea. Hybrids are bad news. They still contain A people and B people and their endless references: ‘We in A did, We in B run…’ etc. Reboot the system. Make it brand new, shiny C. The best of the past may not be the future you need.