Integration by Design: To Integrate or Not to Integrate 

As moderator David Olsson, Managing Director at IMAA, put it, the question of “to integrate or not to integrate” sounds like a strategic decision. In practice, as this session repeatedly uncovered, it rarely behaves like one. 

The webinar brought together Staci van Schagen-Toback, who has spent over fifteen years in M&A and post-merger integration and is currently establishing a global PMI framework and team at ZEISS AG (after similar roles at NOVOMATIC and Philips), and Bjoern Leschny, Global Head for Mergers and Acquisitions Integration at Novo Nordisk, who previously led post-merger integration activities at Bayer AG.  

Together with moderators David Olsson and Anne Kampf, they spent the session testing a single, uncomfortable idea: that integration is sold as a strategic choice, but often arrives as something closer to an inevitability. 

The Opening Poll: Did You Really Have a Choice? 

The session began with a live poll asking the audience whether, when they last called integration “a choice,” they actually had one. The answers were telling: “depends on workstream,” “partly,” “not for standalone orgs,” and a number of “in hindsight, no.” 

As Anne observed, this is where the interesting tension lives. Organizations like to believe they are making active decisions. Often, they are catching up with momentum that was set in motion long before the integration team was in the room. 

Synergies and Integration Are Not the Same Word 

The panel’s first real disagreement-that-wasn’t-quite-a-disagreement centered on two words used almost interchangeably in M&A: synergies and integration. 

Staci drew a clear line between them. Synergies, she explained, are the destination. They represent the business case — the value the deal was meant to create. Integration is the mechanism that gets you there.  

Sometimes there’s no quantifiable synergy at all — a deal might be about acquiring technology or capability. But integration is still the enabler of whatever the strategic objective was. 

Bjoern extended the distinction: synergies are the outcome you track. They aren’t only cost synergies — top-line synergies count too. Integration is simply the vehicle for achieving them. 

Anne pushed back gently, suggesting that blurring the two terms might be convenient at the deal stage, since it keeps the business case looking clean.  

The real cost shows up later: the gap between the deal thesis and execution is exactly where value tends to leak away. 

Staci agreed this is a common failure mode. Deal teams build synergy cases without adequately budgeting for the cost of the integration required to realize them. Organizations with a mature, embedded integration function — one that sits inside the deal lifecycle rather than receiving a ‘throw it over the fence’ handoff — are far more likely to build synergy cases that reflect what integration can realistically deliver. 

They’re also more likely to have the standing to say no when synergies aren’t achievable. 

Bjoern added a useful clarifying frame: synergies are enabled by integration, but not every integration step produces a synergy. Some steps can destroy value. The reverse direction — looking from integration back to synergies — makes the distinction much clearer.  

Looking at it the other way around tends to blur the two. 

“Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

David offered the session’s first standout phrase, borrowed from a participant in a recent training. It’s a deceptively simple way of asking whether the cost and disruption of integration is actually proportionate to the value being chased. 

Does Country Culture Really Matter? Or Is It Something Else? 

A pointed audience question asked whether culture and country differences shape how synergies get built and delivered. The panel’s answer converged on a reframe: what looks like culture is often just unfamiliarity. 

Staci hadn’t seen country or culture meaningfully change how a synergy gets built. But she has seen real friction when a company acquires into a geography where it has no existing operations. 

Without local presence, organizations underestimate regulatory hurdles, go-to-market complexity, and operational requirements they simply didn’t know existed. 

David was more direct about separating culture from organizational behavior: a culture of “yes meaning no” is real and creates friction, but it’s an organizational trait, not a national one. People agree to things and later find they can’t deliver.  

Whether they feel safe admitting that has far more to do with how the business operates than where it’s located. 

Bjoern agreed, tying it back to preparation. Regulatory complexity — especially moving between Asia and Europe — creates real hurdles. But the fix isn’t cultural sensitivity training; it’s doing the legwork: getting on a plane early, understanding local requirements, and not assuming your home-market playbook travels. 

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Staci added a concrete warning from experience: things like a managing director needing to hold the same nationality as the country of operation are the kind of regulatory surprise that blows up a synergy timeline if nobody checked for it in advance. 

“Stuff Will Always Take Longer Than You Think” 

Asked directly whether integration timelines hold up in reality, the panel didn’t hesitate. Bjoern said timelines are almost always too optimistic, and that complexity only fully reveals itself once teams have real access and are on the ground.  

Experience helps calibrate future estimates. But the first time an organization runs an integration, it will almost always underestimate how long things take. 

The conversation turned to what’s most commonly underestimated: cost, complexity, or time. Staci named cost specifically. Teams get excited about a deal and don’t want to be the one bursting the bubble by pointing out what integration will actually cost.  

But the cost exists whether or not anyone budgeted for it. 

David agreed, adding that unbudgeted integration work doesn’t disappear; it just becomes a half-finished job, because nobody has spare money sitting in their budget to absorb it. 

That, Bjoern noted, is exactly why pricing in uncertainty properly — treating it as a real line item rather than an afterthought — is one of the most important disciplines an integration team can bring to a deal. 

When Does an Integration Actually End? 

A detailed audience question raised a problem most PMI practitioners recognize but rarely resolve cleanly: organizations target a “business as usual” date, but integration activities, system work, and synergy initiatives routinely run past it.  

So when is an integration actually done? 

Staci’s answer: it depends entirely on the organization’s own definition of done. Some companies don’t close the books until the very last synergy is realized. That can take five or ten years, an impractical timeline to keep a dedicated integration function open for. 

In practice, many organizations anchor the decision to their PMI budget window (often three to four years under standard accounting treatment) and make a deliberate management decision about when integration ends, paired with a clear, trackable handover to the business for whatever work remains. 

Bjoern added a practicality test: does it actually make sense for the acquired organization to take on the remaining work itself? That depends on its size, its access to global expertise, and whether a standing integration team still adds more value than a clean handover would. 

Strategic Logic, or Deal Momentum You Can’t Stop? 

One of the sharper questions of the session asked plainly: is integration driven by strategic logic, or by deal momentum that becomes impossible to stop once in motion? 

Staci’s answer captured the tone of the whole session: it should be driven by strategic logic and good judgment. In practice, “deal fever” often takes over, and people like her exist specifically to temper it.  

She was candid that M&A isn’t an exact science. There’s no crystal ball, and sometimes a decision works out and sometimes it doesn’t. 

David agreed, but reframed the stakes: if the corporate strategy is to grow quickly — particularly in private-equity-backed contexts — the mandate is often simply “spend the money, integrate as best you can, on this timeline.” The strategic question isn’t always “should we integrate,” but “how far do we integrate, given the time and value we actually need to capture.” 

Staci, by her own admission speaking from a pro-integration bias, noted that fully standalone acquisitions — buying a business and deliberately not integrating anything — rarely produce long-term value in her experience.  

They can look fine in the short term, though. 

What Gets Underestimated, What Gets Lost in the Handover 

The discussion turned to a structural fault line many integration leaders live with: the handoff between the deal team and the integration team. Staci was clear that what travels — and what gets lost — in that handover depends almost entirely on how closely the two functions work together beforehand. A genuine “throw over the fence” handoff loses information by design. Shared accountability, where deal teams are also held responsible for the assumptions they baked into the business case, changes that dynamic substantially. 

Bjoern agreed, adding that earlier involvement and continuity of people across deal and integration phases preserves institutional knowledge that otherwise simply evaporates. 

This led naturally to a harder question: who actually owns integration success once the deal has closed? The panel’s answer was direct — ultimately, the business leader does. But ownership without real authority, as Anne pointed out, is just accountability without power. Seniority matters here: a senior enough sponsor can keep pushing the narrative forward through the inevitable fatigue that sets in across every level of the organization, not just among the people being “integrated.” 

Keeping People Engaged Without Burning Them Out 

An audience question raised what may be the most universal challenge in PMI: how do you keep people engaged when they’re already exhausted by the acquisition process itself, without losing key talent to attrition? 

Staci’s answer was simple: communication, communication, communication, paired with real transparency. Bjoern agreed, adding that a compelling, honestly-told story about the future — reinforced through small, visible wins — does more to ease anxiety than any single announcement. 

David connected this back to the session’s Shakespearean opening: much of the fear in an integration is fear of the unknown. His practical advice was to pace change deliberately rather than trying to do too much too soon, and to be honest up front that things will take longer, cost more, and deliver less than the initial pitch suggested.  

Overpromising at the start, he argued, is what creates the conditions for burnout and blame later. 

Staci added a point worth sitting with: leaders who haven’t run an acquisition before are often the most afraid to communicate honestly, precisely because naming the hard truths feels like it will make things worse.  

In her experience, the opposite is usually true. Silence drives more attrition than honesty does. 

Influence Shifts. Someone Wins, Someone Quietly Loses.

Anne raised a theme rarely discussed openly: integration reshuffles influence. Some people gain it, often informally, while others lose it without any formal change to their role. 

Staci’s view was that this is unavoidable. There will always be winners and losers in an integration, and trying to make everyone happy is not a realistic goal for anyone in this line of work.  

What matters is transparency about why decisions were made, which softens, though never eliminates, the bruised egos that come with change. 

Bjoern tied this back to fairness as a design principle: if people perceive the process as unbalanced or unfair, the project loses them. Keeping the process visibly fair is one of the few levers an integration leader fully controls. 

Staci added an important caution about survey design: organizations often only check in on how the new employees are feeling, forgetting that the acquiring side’s own people are absorbing change too.  

They have a natural blind spot for that fact precisely because the new team gets the attention. 

Closing Thought: What Are We Willing to Give Up? 

As the session wound down, Anne offered a closing reflection that reframed everything the panel had discussed. Integration, she suggested, is rarely a pure strategic decision. It’s a mix of pressure, timing, expectations, and sometimes simple fear of missing out. 

Her parting provocation reframed the entire ninety minutes: 

“Maybe the real question is not should we integrate — but what are we willing to give up when we do?” 

It’s a fitting echo of the session’s opening line from Hamlet: there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Integration, like the choice to pursue it, is rarely as clean as the business case makes it look.