On a recent trip to the Netherlands promoting the new Dutch translation of Authenticiteit, one issue kept coming up. (No, it didn’t begin with the words “You Americans. . .”.) It was how corporate acquisitions affected authenticity.
I suspect it was due primarily to the recent sale of Dutch banking giant ABN Amro to UK giant Barclays, with other such mergers & acquisitions taken into account, perhaps even going back so far as the January 1, 1930 merger of the British Lever Brothers with the Dutch Margarine Unie to create Unilever (something kept alive to this day by its dual-structure of British and Dutch companies). No matter the cause, many people viscerally understood that merging two corporate identities was fraught with peril, and must be done carefully.
One company that recently made it work for all concerned — most happily its consumers — is Disney’s acquisition of Pixar. The Financial Times highlighted this recently when covering the company’s preview of its forthcoming animation
films: “Disney celebrates its perfect partnership“.
Why has this been such a success? Because while the two companies indeed had different corporate identities (and it was Pixar’s that Disney wanted to graft onto its animation unit, not the usual other way around), they come from one common heritage of animation, storytelling, and Walt Disney idolization. As CEO Robert Iger says in the piece, Pixar is “the new DNA of Disney animation”.
Actually, I hate to disagree with him when he’s doing so very well, but it is more the case that Pixar is the old DNA, the original DNA, brought back in to a unit that had lost its way. Bravo.
If this issue is at all a concern of yours, I do encourage you to read Chapter 9 of Authenticity where we provide the Here-and-Now Space model for figuring out how to make strategic decisions that enable you to remain true to self. It highlights The Walt Disney Company — for both good and bad — in showing how it works.
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