Mergers, restructures and the art of giving bad news

It’s hard to look a room of dedicated employees dead in the eye and explain why they may not have a job with your firm soon. (Image: Getty)

Chamanthie Sinhalage-Fonseka

Fri, 15 Sep 2023

Twenty-five years after the doomed merger of Daimler-Benz and the Chrysler Corporation, the deal and its collapse are still the poster child for how change communication missteps in a time of flux create the kind of severe cultural misalignment that ultimately results in commercial and reputational hits. That merger remains a cautionary tale for the ages.In 1998, the US$36 billion (NZ$61b) deal that birthed a new entity, DaimlerChrysler AG, was the largest-ever foreign acquisition of a US company. The publicity of the merger was announced...

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