Ending the old is facilitated also by gaining a sense of the new. Cultural transformation in M&A is difficult unless there is some explicit management philosophy with values and norms that guide behavior in the combined organization. To create the new culture of ABB after the cross-border merger of Asea and Brown Boveri, the CEO spent three months with his new senior management team defining a “policy bible” to guide the intended new organization. It was a manual of “soft” principles such as speed in decision making (“better to be quick and roughly right than slow and completely right”) and for conflict management (“you can only kick a conflict upstairs once for arbitration”), as well as “hard” practices such as the financial measurement systems that would apply across all units of the newly merged entity (Stahl et
al., 2004). In the transformational merger that created Novartis, the CEO led the change process by communicating the new set of core values in numerous employee workshops around the world. This intervention, supported by a new performance management system and investment in training and development, helped build the desired “highperformance” culture