surviving and thriving through a major pharmaceutical company merger

the Challenge of success

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surviving & thriving through a major pharmaceutical company merger

The business need

Two medium sized pharmaceutical companies merged to create one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies in order to create a sufficient critical mass to compete at a global level and to fill the gap created by some major drugs going off patent.

The challenge was to address both the 'business processes' (e.g. structure and roles) and the 'human processes' (e.g. culture and resistance to change). The goal was deliver more efficient working in terms of output per person and speed and quantity of drug development.

What CLC did

CLC started with an audit to identify the key themes that were critical to achieving a successful merger. These were identified as:

• ability to think globally and respond locally
• providing leadership
• developing cross cultural understanding and alignment

CLC then coached global and local directors across the different sites and facilitated large meetings of up to 200 people to resolve the most significant change issues.

CLC monitored global and local 'patterns' (i.e. what are people thinking and feeling about the different parts of the business, about their department and about leadership). This way CLC acted as 'eyes and ears' so that leadership had ongoing feedback on how they were doing in leading the change, and their people understood and worked with the themes that were significant to change success.

The outcome

Leadership improved and aligned the business processes and won hearts and minds. They were able to produce some impressive business results:

• common processes are being developed and metrics introduced
• synergies achieved, efficiency increased and output maintained
• there is one global function including the USA