I was talking to Mary Walker, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist, about the proposed deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, and we were wondering how such a deal would work itself out. Mergers and acquisitions are fraught with difficulty, and Mary was pointing out that the failure rate is sometimes as high as 60%. And this is after tough minded MBAs have examined the deal with their own particularly sophisticated, sighted, numerate version of due diligence. When things go bad in a merger or an acquisition, the problem is sometimes not with the mechanics, not with the infrastructure of the deal. The problem is with the superstructure of the deal, the ideas, practices and cultures that must now be brought together for things to work. We are still inclined to suppose that mergers and acquisitions are straightforward, that the individuals who must now work together need merely resort to an instrumental logic to find common cause and a shared modus operandi. But of course the truth is often otherwise.
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