If you are wondering where your transformational merger is going wrong, you may want to look in the toilets. After Lenovo bought IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, the Chinese company replaced traditional squat toilets in its Beijing headquarters with western-style sit-down bowls to put non-Chinese colleagues and customers at ease.

如果想知道你的转型并购在哪儿出了问题，也许你应该看看厕所。2005年联想(Lenovo)收购了IBM的个人电脑业务后，将北京总部传统式的蹲便厕所改为了西式的坐便厕所，以方便外国员工和客户。

It was just one symbol of the attention to detail that eventually made a success of the sometimes tortured integration of the two companies. Others included switching to English as the enlarged group’s corporate language from day one, to the distress of some Mandarin-speakers, and making sure coffee, as well as traditional loose-leaf tea, was available when westerners visited Chinese facilities.

两家公司的整合有时是令人煎熬的，但正是由于联想对细节的关注，才最终使并购获得了成功。上述改变仅为其中一例。其它细节还包括在并购后的首日就将扩大后集团的工作语言变为英语（这使一些说中文的员工感到很难受）；确保西方人参观中国工厂时，既可以选择咖啡又可以选择传统散茶。

Since January, Lenovo has announced the purchase of IBM’s x86 server business for $2.3bn and the Motorola handset business from Google for $2.9bn. Just absorbing one of those large deals would be challenging, but Yolanda Conyers, Lenovo’s chief diversity officer, told me the company has learnt from experience: “It’s gotten easier because we put the hard work in early.”

从1月起，联想已宣布斥资23亿美元收购IBM的x86服务器业务，以及以29亿美元从谷歌(Google)手中收购摩托罗拉(Motorola)手机业务。单单消化这两笔巨额交易中的任何一笔，都将充满挑战，但联想负责文化整合与多元化的副总裁约兰达•科尼尔斯(Yolanda Conyers)告诉我，联想已经从经验中学到了东西：“我们提前开始做困难的工作，因此这些变得更容易了。”

If only that were true of all companies. I chaired a discussion with 60 senior executives and advisers last week about how to turn visionary deals into reality. On a show of hands, virtually all of them had been involved in some capacity in an acquisition, which should mean that merger implementation is now a core skill for many. But while dealmaking no longer suffers the 70 per cent failure rate of the bid-first, ask-questions-later takeovers of the 1990s, 54 per cent of a sample of more recent UK and US deals examined by London’s Cass Business School destroyed value in the two years after acquisition. Whatever language you translate it into, the message is clear: not good enough.

要是所有的公司都能这样做就好了。不久前，我主持了一场有60名高管和顾问参加的讨论，其内容是关于如何将并购设想变为现实。经过举手示意，他们几乎都曾参与过并购工作，这应该意味着并购执行如今是许多人的核心技能。然而，尽管并购不再像上世纪90年代“先买后问”那样被七成的失败率所困扰，但是根据伦敦卡斯商学院(Cass Business School)的调查，近期英国和美国的并购案样本中，54%的案例在合并后的两年内贬值。不论你如何解读，其信息是明确的：这不够好。

It is too simple to invite companies to stop dealmaking altogether. The problems encountered by Lenovo – and detailed in The Lenovo Way, a new book by Ms Conyers and colleague Gina Qiao – are enough to put anybody off the cross-border, transformational variety. Boards should beware of deals done for the chief executive’s ego. But many large companies at least need to develop a technique for successfully absorbing smaller acquisitions.

要求公司干脆停止并购太过简单。联想所遇到的困难（科尼尔斯及其同事乔健(Gina Qiao)的新书《联想之道》(The Lenovo Way)中有具体描述），足以使任何人在跨境转型并购带来的多样性面前望而却步。董事会应该提防因首席执行官的自负而达成的并购。但是，很多大公司至少需要发展出一套成功消化较小并购的技巧。

A starting point would be to stop calling these deals “bolt-ons”, which is disparaging to the entrepreneurial businesses you are buying and implies that a bloke with a monkey-wrench can attach the new company in a morning. Merely bolting on an acquisition is to guarantee that over time it will rust away through neglect.

第一步是不要再把这些交易称为“补强收购”（bolt-ons，中文直译是用螺栓固定的意思——译者注）。这种称谓是对你所收购企业的一种贬低，暗示找个人拿个扳手一上午就可以把这个新公司“固定”上。而如果只是“固定”，此后必然会导致因忽视而造成的锈烂。

Cass research – and the experts I consulted last week – suggest that omitting to consult the company’s “people” people early enough makes it more likely a deal will fail. Involve HR even in the targeting of acquisitions and the chances of success should improve. Deciding who will be in charge is critical, but hard decisions on people and culture need to be taken throughout the organisation. The IBM PC deal was “a struggle because we didn’t know how to deal with diversity, leadership and culture”, admits Lenovo’s Ms Qiao.

卡斯商学院的研究，以及我在那次讨论中从专家那里得到的意见，都表明若不尽早咨询公司的人事部门，并购失败的可能性会提升。即使是确立收购目标的时候，也应引入人力资源部门，这样成功的几率就会提高。确定谁说了算很关键，但全公司上下都需要做出有关人事和文化的艰难决定。乔健坦言，并购IBM个人电脑业务“很艰难，因为我们不知道如何应对多元化、领导和文化问题”。

Failure to integrate systems can also cripple a deal. Johanna Waterous – who, as a consultant, private equity adviser and non-executive director, has seen transactions from all angles – says poor information technology integration can infect an entire organisation with problems that last years. Her rule of thumb is that boards need to assume melding IT will take five times as long and cost five times as much as they first estimate.

系统整合的失败也会严重损害并购。曾担任过咨询师、私募股权顾问以及非执行董事的约翰娜•沃特斯(Johanna Waterous)从各种角度见证过并购交易。她说如果不能很好地整合信息技术，整个公司将长年被问题所困扰。她的经验之谈是，若要整合IT，董事会应该将他们预估的时间和成本都乘以五。

It is a mixed blessing that consultancies are now always at hand with their Big Book of Deal Integration to assist the process. Advisers who have seen 40 or 50 deals to completion and beyond will know more about the practicalities than the nervous chief executive doing his or her first big transaction.

现在你总能轻易找到手持“交易整合宝典”的并购咨询人士来协助并购，这是一件好坏参半的事。比起初次经历大型并购的紧张的CEO，见识过四五十个并购案的整个过程和结果的顾问在实际操作方面了解得更多。

But it is the CEO who has to live with the consequences, and no manual can account for the myriad differences between companies and the multiple challenges that combining them will generate. In this respect only, Ms Conyers and Ms Qiao are ill-served by the title of their book (which was not their first choice). As they point out, an adaptable state of mind is more important than a fixed “way” or template for integration. If you cannot be flexible, you may as well flush the whole rationale for the deal away.

但是，承担结果的是CEO本人。没有一本“宝典”能说明公司之间的无数差异，或者合并这些公司带来的重重挑战。仅从这方面来讲，科尼尔斯和乔健的新书标题（这个标题并不是她们的首选）并不能表达她们的真意。正像她们所指出的那样，对于并购整合而言，适应性强的心态比一种固定的“道”或样板重要得多。如果你无法适应，那么整个并购的意义都将付之东流。