A Frenchman and an American walk into a bar and over pissaladière and fried chilli chicken wings come up with the idea of working together and operating efficiently from their respective home turf to compete cost effectively with competitors from China and Asia Pacific. What could possibly go wrong
On face value, the merger of Alcatel and Lucent was a necessity to ward off serious global competition from Huawei and other telecom competitors. The combined strength of both organisations made sense and joining their respective technologies even more so.
BUT - dig down under the covers and there are several ingredients that make a recipe for disaster. French cuisine and America's lack of anything 'cuisine' would result in a disastrous recipe and this was no different in the 2006 merger of US based Alcatel and French based Lucent. So what were the unsavoury ingredients?
As always, there are good and not so good lessons to be learned, but you might need to listen to the podcast to find that out.