If you work in cross-cultural communications, what you want to avoid at all cost is the cookie cutter.
Koushik Chatterjee, CFO of Tata Steel, gave a great definition of it in a recent interview with McKinsey: “We do these five things, and therefore these five things must be done by everyone.”
 His approach to international M&A is different: “we quite genuinely tend to look at an acquisition as a partnership rather than an acquisition”.
“We don’t send planeloads of people into a new company. Instead, we only send a few integrators. That’s been the key interface.”
I particularly like his way of engaging employees from the acquired company, a process he calls “shared change”: “we share and adopt good practices across the organisation through performance-improvement teams…This gives employees in the acquired organisation a sense of confidence that they too have good things that the parent company is absorbing”.
 Chatterjee admits that “it takes time to positively influence a large organisation”. But the secret is to build “trust in the sincerity of the shared vision”.
Trust might take longer to establish but once you are there, “things move faster; you don’t have to go around reassuring people”.
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