As the merger or acquisition receives legal approval, the combination phase begins with earnest attention to planning how to join together the partners. This is a critical period when the organization is at least somewhat un frozen and employees are relatively malleable to new ways of doing things. Most executives miss this opportunity and, instead, try to combine quickly rather than carefully with the promise of coming back later to rethink culture and “fix” things later on. Of course, they rarely make the time to revisit combination decisions and, even if they did,
they would have to deal with un freezing the newly solidified norms and practices that
have been set in place.