Hi, this is Greg Kielstrom. Welcome to season three of the Agile World, where we discuss customer

employee experience, organizational and workforce transformation, and how business can adapt and

continually improve at an Agile age. The Agile World podcast is brought to you by tech systems,

an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application.

For more information, go to techsystems.com. To read more about the topics discussed in the show,

you can go to my website at theagile.world and read my latest articles or get a copy of my latest

book, The Agile Workforce, now available on Amazon and other retailers. My name is Greg Kielstrom,

and I'm the host of the Agile World podcast. Today we're going to talk about mergers,

acquisitions, and how to ensure a successful outcome when two or more company teams and cultures

are merged. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Clint Kendrick, chair of the HR

M&A Roundtable. Welcome to the show. Great. Thanks for having me, Greg.

So Clint, you've been part of a lot of M&A activity within your career, and a lot of what we hear

on the outside, let's say, is talk of financial opportunities and financial considerations when

we're talking about mergers and acquisitions. But today we're going to talk a little bit about

another very important consideration when companies do a merger, and that's things like

retaining key talent and other HR-related issues, which have an effect on both short and long-term

productivity and even things like long-term innovation. So your first book, The HR Practitioners,

Guide to Mergers and Acquisitions, Do Diligence, filled a gap in the market. Can you talk a little

bit about why he wrote it and the challenges that helps businesses solve? Absolutely. So I wrote

the book for a few reasons. One of them, I was one of those acquired employees. In fact, I've

been acquired a number of times in my career. A couple of times it really didn't affect me personally,

but one of those times the company was so dramatically changing the way that I was compensated

...