Mergers & acquisitions: deploying Culture Transformation and Change Management processes.

Aligning two organisations around a common purpose, values and vision to create a sustainable, high-performance culture.

Objectives

Oxford Leadership was engaged by the CEO of NXP Semiconductors to support senior leadership alignment and culture integration following NXP’s acquisition of one of its biggest competitors, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. an American multinational corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas with operations in more than 75 locations in 19 countries, and 17,000 employees worldwide. The task was to unite and align the two organisations with a common purpose, values and vision in order to create a sustainable, high-performance culture.

Solution

Oxford Leadership developed and deployed a culture transformation and change management process known as ‘Making a Difference’. This involved a 3-day ‘purpose’ workshop for the senior leadership team to define common purpose, values and vision for the new combined organisation and to establish 6 core elements in a ‘way of working’, which would shape the organisational culture of the future. These include a communications code based on trust and respect, core values and behaviours, a decision-making framework, feedback protocols and a ‘Breakthrough’ process for solving complex, critical problems. This leadership workshop was subsequently conducted with the management teams of each business unit, product line and global function. Eighty-five internal facilitators were trained by Oxford Leadership to cascade throughout the organisation, eventually facilitating 1200 workshops reaching 35,000 engineers over 4 months.

The Breakthrough process helped us align as a management team and engage our top 90 leaders with fierce resolve to outperform the market.

Ruediger Stroh
Executive Vice President, NXP

Results

The merger is considered to be one of the most successful ever in the semi-conductor industry. In May 2016, Forbes Magazine wrote, “The Right Way to Do a Merger. The New NXP leverages Freescale Resources” , the articles cites the company’s successful culture integration as one of the main reasons why the new NXP has succeeded in becoming the global #1 in critical focus areas including autonomous vehicles, smart cities, mobile and wearable IoT applications, smart networks and an underlying theme around security.