When cultures collide

The process of a merger or acquisition is made up of different phases. There is the initial buzz and excitement. Then there is the pressure and push through due diligence, a time when the acquired workforce is acutely aware of the uncertainty ahead. What will happen to their roles, their status, their jobs? For large deals requiring government approval, there is a mad dash once the companies receive the green light from the authorities – a scramble of signatures, disclosures, announcements, and press because the deal has now been ‘closed’. Then the journalists and the lawyers move on to something else. But for the people in the two companies that have just merged, this is when the next phase starts and the real work begins. Google acquired the cybersecurity firm Mandiant in September 2022 for $5.4 billion. To date, it is the second largest acquisition in Google history. The strategic logic behind the deal was clear and straightforward: buy one of the best brands in cybersecurity to help build the world’s most secure cloud. At the time, I was chief of staff to Mandiant’s Chief Product Officer. Our teams across product and engineering were highly involved in the due diligence process and I did what any CoS does in times of pressure and chaos: lessen the chaos and get the trains running. While the process was involved and complex, the real challenge came later when we faced the task of combining two companies in the pursuit of a powerful corporate vision.

The strategic nature of the acquisition created genuine excitement. Mandiant’s culture is strongly ‘mission driven’. ‘We respond to the breaches that matter’' was a common refrain of the CEO, Kevin Mandia (Kevin has stepped down). So the mission to build the world’s most secure cloud resonated strongly. Still, everything from employees’ laptops to team calendars, to vendor contracts, to job titles, had to change. The sweeping change affected the processes of the business that create the texture of people’s daily rhythm. Such disruptions bring out the deep influence of a company's culture. And this was where my role as an operator receded and the other side of being a chief of staff took priority: serving as the connective tissue across teams and organisations. Google has a strong engineering culture that prioritises the input of the frontline employees. Brilliant engineers are the heroes and teams strive to include as many perspectives as possible when making decisions. That, in part, is how you end up with a culture that could create Gmail, an engineer’s side project that was born of annoyance with how email worked. An engineer may put on their team’s hoodie (likely their ‘nice hoodie’) to show pride in their creation. Mandiant employees were excited and intrigued to be part of this new-to-them culture. At the same time, the Mandiant hero is the incident responder or the intelligence professional who does not hesitate to help a customer in crisis. They calmly guide a CEO and their board through deep moments of crisis while dealing with the threat of criminals demanding multimillion dollar ransoms. It's a disciplined organisation. People understand a chain of command and how to respond quickly during a crisis, even when it gets messy. Everyone knew these differences existed and understood that integrating established cultures is inherently challenging. But we also knew there was great potential. The empowerment and innovation of Google mixed with Mandiant’s mission drive would be a formidable combination. What we didn’t know – but soon found out – was how much work it would require to integrate the cultures in the day-to-day life and rhythm of business. How teams make decisions or regard a chain of command affect countless things in the course of a day. While there was excitement and genuine desire to merge the cultures, subtle cultural differences crept up. For instance, Mandiant people often did not use the ‘raise your hand’ function in a meeting. Everyone seemed to speak over one another, though the chain of command was obvious to the participants. This could seem rude or chaotic to Googlers who tended to raise their hands in video calls, taking turns politely. And, naturally, they did it using Google Video Chat – Mandiant had used Microsoft products for meetings and communications for years. Inevitably, a Googler would dazzle with some feature in Docs or Sheets while someone like me could get frustrated when we could not recreate the feature or capability. These were small cultural tendencies that could add friction to the rhythm of business, not clashes. As the teams spent more time together, they would learn these nuances and adapt. But it was in the earliest weeks of the integration that they were most noticeable, and it was during this time that being able to translate between the cultures was most valuable.