On merging two corporate cultures, the personnel of both parties will try to hang on to their own practices for a range of reasons. This may or may not serve the new entity.

Therefore, a way to break the "territorial" approach that is inevitable (my experience in hundreds of corporations), is to create "neutral" territory that all personnel can buy into.

The way to do this is:

1. As a group, determine the new organisation's KPOs (ensuring of course that these KPOs are the ones that will be endorsed by the Board and the corporation's shareholders.

2. Once KPOs are resolved, as a group, define the Newco's market from which those KPOs will be delivered.

3. Once the market has been defined, determine the product/service mix that will extract those KPOs from the market.

4. Once the product/service mix is resolved, determine channels (i.e. how the products/services will get into the market, how they will be supported and what the communication/promotion strategy will be to attract the target consumers.

5. Then, and only then, can you resolve what sort and how many people you need to deliver the agreed KPOs. That will/should also enable you to determine what sort of culture and organisational values and ethics are required to deliver those KPOs.

6. Simultaneously with #5, you can consider what systems, I.T. and processes are required. These are an outcome of the previously made decisions.

7. Once the preceeding has been resolved, the group can then determine the "corporate envelope" required to make it happen: management levels, organisation structure and corporate enablers. (Note that 'Structure' is a "lower-level" decision)

8. When you throw all of those decisions into the appropriate matrix, you get a range of outcomes - these must equal or exceed your agreed KPOs. If they don't, your groups need to rework some of the decisions they made - starting with the most recent and working "up" the decision hierarchy until effort = KPOs..

In my experience, merging two cultures is difficult and all the harder when there isn't a logical decision hierarchy. By using this process, you will get agreement on corporate KPOs for the Newco, and all else follows from that.