Thriving in Times of Change With Flexibility in Your Integration Planning

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Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon to our community here at M and A Science. Our goal is to deliver knowledge, knowledge that we learn from the community and we return back to the community. By visiting M and A Science, you'll find all the information you need to help upskill your M and A career. To get started, all you have to do is sign up for our free weekly newsletter to stay current on the latest courses, upcoming events, and expert interviews. Again, that's M and A Science. Hi everybody. This is John Morata, Chief Operating Officer here at M and A Science. And today I am so excited to introduce to you Stacy Van Shagen tobac. Stacey, how are you?

I'm very good, thank you.

Lovely. For those who aren't familiar with Stacy, she actually heads up M and A Integration and Disentanglement at Philips. Philips is a multinational corporation and they are traded on the New York Stock Exchange as ehg. So with that, Stacey, today for our audience, we're going to go over the topic around flexibility, notably how to bake flexibility into integration in this current market. Flexibility is probably the modus operandi of many cultural changes within integration. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell us more about about how you got started in integration and in M and A?

Sure. Thanks. And I'm really excited to be here as well, John. Thanks for having me. Stepping back a little in who I am and where I come from my background molded me and brought me to where I am today. So I've been in the position I have now for about five years I guess you could say officially M and A Integration and disentanglement just for five years. But of course that's not the case. I've been doing integration and separation for many years only. Yeah, it wasn't really a discipline at the time. So I've been piecing that together a bit across my career. So I lead a team of program managers and we focus on integration and separation activities at Philips globally. And as you said, Philips is a health technology company. We've been on our acquisition and divestment journey since about 2014. We got very serious when we took the strategic decision to become a pure health tech player. So I started at Philips in 2014. It was welcome to Philips and you're going to help disentangle the lighting business from Philips. So right when I started it was the biggest disentanglement or separation that the Philips had done and it was really our huge step to health tech. So there I was part of the IT work stream. So I led the IT procurement work stream because I was the IT business partner of the procurement. I learned so much on that journey just because procurement touches so many parts of the organization. So that really gave me a broad perspective of the operation of Philips. That was how I came into Philips. I was an IT business partner for many enabling functions where we do the business transformation roadmap.

But.

But then as part of that I also was the IT transition manager for the global business services which is like integration in that you're moving these internal processes to enabling services in low cost countries for more efficiency. But then again you're using the same models of integration. Led international integration in a project that spanned 34 countries, had a project team of over 150 people. And it taught me a lot about the world and also about Philip. So I think that gave me a great basis to lead the team I lead now. We oversee many integration and disentanglement projects. Some of them make it over the line, some of them don't. All of us that are practitioners would recognize that. And if you want to know more about what we did, you can check out our corporate website. And I just want to go back a little bit to what I said before. Yeah, I've been officially for five years in the M and A, but of course that's not the case. And prior to Philips I worked in publishing both international and domestic and there also dabbled a bit in Integration and disentanglement, but just from a different perspective in publishing. So kind of have that vast fast background in different industries.

Oh my gosh, there's so much to unpack there. I'm writing notes as quickly as possible to keep up with your history and your experience. I'd actually like to double down on the topic of perspective. Your tenure, both national, international, which you covered, is outstanding. Philips itself is a multinational corporation. How would you say that through your experiences just outside of Philips, within Philips, that this has enhanced your perspective around running global integration projects and programs? What has it that spurred like this culmination, if you will, of just knowledge about how you run a global program around integration?

It's really important to have a good view of the world, understanding the cultures a little bit better when you're running global integrations. And ever since I was young I've been very active in intercultural activities, let's say, and interacting with different cultures from around the world. And that was really what bit me and made me want to work internationally, let's say, because I like bringing different cultures together and working different cultures. I think it really helps because you have an understanding of how the different groups kind of work. Also having a multinational team really helps understand the different cultures. So my team, I think we have, I don't know, we're a team of about 10 and we're probably five or six different nationalities. It really helps in bringing a different approach to the transformations that we do. And I think that plays a key role when you have a global integration because you also need to understand each other. So like I was talking about that large project I worked on, our IMO consisted of, I think four or five nationalities working together. And that really helped us have that view on all the other countries that we needed to integrate into this project. I think it's a lot harder to integrate across geographies because you're also not dealing with one specific country. Laws and compliancy rules. You really have to look at how does HR work in China? I can tell you it's very different than how it works in the Netherlands or in the us so it's really good to have that perspective when you're running these types of integration, it's not necessary, you can learn it. I learned a lot. But having that diverse cultural background and understanding really helped me, especially knowing a lot about international business and where we needed to go. So that helps navigate and I think also makes it a little bit easier and more flexible if you do understand that.

I love the idea of multinational teams. It's something that myself, over my career doing integrations, I've found to be just one of those hidden gems, if you will, not only from the perspective of people being in different places, but the difference in culture, the difference in ideas, the difference in ideology. Bringing that all together really creates just a really nice dynamic that I can learn from as well. As an IMO leader, it's been wonderful to. To participate in that, because one of the things that I think is important as a leader is to learn and continuously improve on myself and every integration that I've ever done. And if I may, I want to go off script a little bit, which is on the culture point. With so many people in different countries and different geographies, how does Stacy keep her team moving forward with a lot of that differentiation that you're trying to absorb and learn from and continue to stabilize and standardize? Is that something that you do in terms of process or as a leader, make sure that the team continues to move forward with some level of stability?

One of the things is we're a very tight team, so we're very aware of each other's strengths and weaknesses. We create a lot of psychological safety in our team, so we really feel like we can ask each other anything. And I think the diverse cultures and working in different geographies also helps that you can ask someone in the team, like, hey, I'm feeling uncomfortable when I'm in discussions with our Japanese colleagues. Do you have any tips on how to do that? Or things like that? And I think that really helps us and helps me as a leader, to encourage them to step outside their comfort zone and to feel like they can do that. And we're very aware of the different cultures within Philips. Just because Philips is such a global company. It's kind of part of your DNA when you're onboarded is to really understand that, hey, we work across the globe and we have to be sensitive to different cultures and ways of working in healthcare, it's even more important to understand the different regulatory environments that you're facing, because besides all the cultural aspects of how to even talk to people in an integration, you also have the, okay, but what are my rules of the game in that specific geography? So I really help the team in learning, being open and being able to have those conversations when you're in those difficult situations.

Wow, that's so powerful. Just the idea of having the rules of the game predefined our audience today. There are many who actually also work for other multinationals around this Idea of safety. What would you recommend as one of the first steps that they can take to espouse this idea of safety within your imo?

One of the things I do when we're onboarding new colleagues is we give everyone a copy of a book called the Culture Map. That's by Erin Meyer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it helps set the scene of the differences in how cultures work. And I think once you've taken the time to read that book and you have an idea, especially if you're new to the international way of working, I think that really helps you to kind of get a grasp of how people work. And you'll also have those aha moments when you're in those discussions. Aha. I remember reading that about that specific culture. So that's one of the things we do. The other thing I try to do is just have a really open and transparent relationship with the team so that they feel comfortable enough and not intimidated to have those conversations. I try to be as encouraging as possible. I'm also very direct and sometimes say the wrong things. But then I go back and say, hey, sorry, I was probably a little bit harsh there, but what I meant to say was so really gives them a feeling of working together. And we do a lot of learnings and deep dives like you talked about. Continuous improvement. We do a lot of continuous improvement and learnings as we go along so that people feel comfortable in sharing how they did something. They get tips, maybe other ways they can look at it. But we're very respectful of everyone's journey. And when you're looking at IMO specifically because we advise the IMO's, we're part of the IMO for a while and then it's business as usual where the business integration leader will take over with their project managers, let's say, try to also give them the tools they need. Or we as a team, we what they need to be able to work in that intercultural environment. But a lot of people at Philips already have that or they're expats or they've been in international so long that yeah, they don't even know what it's like to work in a domestic company, for instance.

It's such a big world. It sounds like in terms of the Philips culture, but even within your own team, you building your own culture I think is amazing. I'm definitely going to look at the book called the Culture Map by Erin Meyer. Let's actually talk about this idea of the continuous improvement. It's an important topic. I think from what you just mentioned and the way that you want your team to continue to evolve. I found that just for my own personal career, continuous improvement has allowed me to rebuild myself over time when I thought maybe I didn't want to do integration anymore. And I just go in house, if you will, and just run a BU or just run a department. But then things come up and I'm like, oh, I get revived and recharged about doing integration all over again. And this idea of continuous improvement is one of those principles that comes out in terms of agile principles. It's one of those tenets of agile.

Yeah.

So let's shift a little bit and discuss the methods behind what Stacy employs, not only at Philips, but also over her career. One of the tenets that I also want to talk about is with regard to delivering outcomes. Right. It's not just about delivering on a date, it's not about delivering on a budget, but it's about delivering outcomes. Would you agree that there's this movement toward delivering outcomes from integration, not just delivering a successful merger of a company?

A hundred percent. We're definitely seeing that. I want to touch on all these and I hope I don't forget each one. So remind me if I do. Let me start with continuous improvement. I also want to call it continuous learning. I think continuous learning, continuous improvement is really important to be flexible and agile. So what we do as a team is after we've had a, let's say a big deliverable like the integration readiness deck, which for us is like this huge deliverable of your plan of what you're going to do in integration. We have a deep dive meeting with the. Where the program leaders who are working on that project present what they did. Not the deck, but how they got to the deck. So what are the things they did in order to get there? What are the challenges they encountered? Why did they encounter those challenges? And how can we improve that moving forward? And usually after each of those deep dives we call them, we come up with ways to change our process a little bit or change our template or do things a little bit differently from the learnings. That's one way to be agile and to really focus on how to learn from experience and to make sure the team. And this goes back a little bit to. Yeah, we're constantly. Not constantly, but every few years you have this turnover of. After about three or four years, we tend to make a move within Phillips. So you're going to get new people coming in who need to Be trained by having these continuous learning sessions. You give them the tools they need to be able to develop quicker because they hear what's happening from others. So you also become more agile and a little more flexible in delivering on your strategy of integration or separation. To go to your other question about delivering on outcomes, there's definitely been a shift from, hey, let's get this project done A, B, C, D, hey, we're integrated. We move forward to did we deliver on the value that we said we were going to when we went into this acquisition? So we're seeing a shift from really looking at planning, getting your IT done, getting, just checking all the boxes, to moving into delivering on value creation. And that means being agile in your integration planning. It means, hey, we might not 100% go into our ERP system, but we might do a hybrid approach because we want to create value. So what we're doing now is we've just actually completed a, what we call annual improvement plans where we worked on how can we better show value creation and what do we need to change in our process in order to create that value creation. And what we've done is we've really focused on, there was a huge focus on get things done, spend the money in the two years of your PMI budget period, and then the value will create itself. But we all know value doesn't create itself. The business is super excited about doing this integration. We need to make sure we're focusing on the right thing. So now we're looking more to capability building towards the value drivers. So we identify earlier in the process. And this came from our continuous learning. We look at the value drivers earlier in our process and then we assign owners to that from a business perspective. And then we are going to drive the value creation through releasing capabilities within the planning that will enhance those value drivers and then ensure that we create the value first before we finish all the checks in the boxes. So that's how we're adapting that and becoming more, I would say more, more agile, more flexible. But it's really delivering on your promises a little quicker. If you talk to other practitioners as well, they'll probably say we eventually get to the value, but it's not in the three, five years that we had initially said, maybe it's in more in the outer years. And by focusing more on this value creation earlier, we're hoping to get that value earlier in the process.

Okay, I can't keep up with the speed at which you're getting all this amazing information. If I may. I'm Going to summarize a little bit of what I heard, but certainly feel free to correct me where I'm wrong. One of the original points that you made around learning about the why, not just the how, why do we do certain things a certain way to get to the integration readiness tech? What were the lessons learned that we applied, that we've now absorbed and of course instituted into the next version of that, which is the better version to do the next acquisition? I love the topic of did we deliver on what we expected to? And what I wanted to add onto that was did we deliver the right thing? And to your point of value creation, which is right, did we deliver value for all the stakeholders involved in this transaction? Whether it's a disentanglement, a roll up or an acquisition, we have to look at a lot of facets. We have our employees, we have our customers, we have our vendors, we have our key stakeholders, we have our customers. All of that is part of delivering the right thing in terms of value creation.

It's a lot to unpack there because I think we focus a lot on the numbers. So did we create the value in dollars or euros or whatever currency you're using? And we don't focus a lot on what you said, which is did we create value with maybe our contracts or our customers? We measure that differently. So we measure NPS scores, for instance, for our customers, things like that. I don't think we're as good at capturing things outside of monetary value yet, but it's definitely a very good point that you make that we should be putting more focus on all of the other value creation that should come out of it. We identify a lot of it, but we focus a lot on the numbers just because that's where the financials come from when you're a listed company.

I totally understand. Maybe a lesson learned for all of us as well, which is we got to pay attention to the numbers a little bit better overall. One of the things that I heard you mention was that this integration readiness deck, it takes, it's a process to get there, right? It's a learning process also to get there. But once you're there, it's great because people are engaging and having conversations and exchanging information. But I'm going to go a little bit off script here, Stacey, to ask you, which is what happens when you don't know something or you can't forecast past 100 days, what happens then and how do you address that with the team so that you continue to move forward in the conversation so that you're kind of baking in some uncertainty into your assumptions as you build your integration plan.

You're absolutely correct in the integration readiness deck is a process. It's a iterative process. It's not something that is just born. We don't just fill in slides. We're really building it from the ground up. We have a template, of course, and we decide which parts are the most important to present, let's see, for approval. But we make sure we fill in all the parts. And it's not just about the first hundred days. It's really about our approach for making this a success within Philips. So it goes much further than that and it goes into a lot of details, including what is your legal entity roadmap. It goes really into the nitty gritty. But it is a process and you can't know everything at the start of a integration. So what do we do? First of all, it is iterative, it's very agile. And that we're changing and editing and recreating as we go through. Because what we do is we check with the business leaders, we check with the owners of these value creation targets, we check with our markets that they're going to be able to do what the business thinks they're going to be able to do to sell. So we have a lot of those checks. And along the way we find out if it's actually possible to do this or not. And then we will tweak it or we'll bring up red flags saying, hey, this is going to be challenging. What do we need to do to prevent those red flags in the future? So it's very much fluid in building it. And then once we have it, it's a stick in the mud. It's not to say this is what you have to do. So you have to continuously change that as we move forward in the integration. That's one part of it. But also the team should not be afraid to make mistakes. Right? We can't know what we don't know. We don't know everything. So we need to make sure that we leave room for that adaptation as you move through the deliverables.

Huge point about adaptability. Given our current economic situation around the world, we certainly see companies adapting very quickly to lots of different things from ESG to supply chain challenges. There's a lot going on there. I like the point about checks and balances. I will be honest, I've probably not been the best in my whole career putting in checks and balances with my own leadership team. I tend to have a plan, and then I tend to stick to it a little bit more so than I probably should and just drive forward. I think I'm going to put that into my next set of integration plans as well, which is checks and balances, for sure. This idea of, of course, not knowing everything and allowing for the flexibility of where errors can occur. Do you find that you have this innate nature of understanding, like, if something's gone too far and you got to kibosh it so that we get back on track, or do you, like the work stream leader, have a little bit free rein, more free reign? I think this is probably a question more for my veteran audience, which is like, how far does Stacy let the team go before she says, okay, timeout, we got to stop. We're going a bit too far here. We're going in the wrong direction.

Let me go a little bit to our process in building the deck. I think there's a timeline to that because you have a certain amount of time that you need to deliver, so it has to be before we go to sign. And that has the agreements you have with the target. So there you have a defined end time. So you know how long you have, and you have a lot of long nights right before that. But it's a deliverable. Once we've done that and we've actually acquired the company, then we of course have the first hundred days where we do the kickoff planning and things like that, and we check our. Check our thinking with the target. So we say, hey, is this right? Did we get our thought process right here? We haven't always done that in the past, but something we've improved upon as a learning. And then we have what we call replanning workshops. And we do that pretty much every quarter. So the furthest out a mistake, let's say, can go is a quarter. Because then we look back and we say, hey, is everything on track or do we need to recalibrate? So we're constantly recalibrating and re baselining and making decisions based on what we now know. Because you never know everything. You're making tons of assumptions when you're taking over a company, even when you're doing separation, tons of assumptions. Until you actually meet with the buyer or the seller and you say, this is what we've thought of. And then you realize, okay, maybe 10%'s right, 50%'s right, 80%'s right. And then you have to shift all that as you move forward. So that's how we adapt for that ever changing, gaining of knowledge. I Guess you could call it.

It sounds like a lot of reeducation as well, like relearning, hey, what I learned six months ago may not be true. Or actually, in some cases, I'll be honest, when I go through some of the due diligence docs, it's, hey, did you make this right assumption? And I guess the market was different six months ago than it is today, but okay, we might have to refactor this and apply a different algorithm.

We also do retrospective, so after a year we do a retrospective of how we did and we also do a retrospective sometimes after three years. And it's very interesting to go back to the diligence documents because I just did one recently and I was like, like, whoa, what were we thinking? So, yeah, that happens all the time because like I said, you don't know what you don't know. I want to go back to something else you said earlier about the psychological safety and the team. The big thing is you got to not be afraid to make a mistake so no one has all the answers. So you have to just be able to work on these assumptions. And a lot of us in this field are really our perfectionists because we're here because we're good at detail and we're good at getting things done. But I think there's a way to be a perfectionist in a way of getting the steps right and learning to apply the fluidity and the adaptation of what you're learning and feeling like you're doing it right because you're applying all these learnings that you have and making it better than having the perfect answer at the beginning. And that's why or how I also try to encourage the team of, yeah, you can't be right most of the time in this job. You're going to be wrong. Learn to appreciate the process. That also gives you a little bit of confidence in being able to make those tough decisions that have to be made. We're going to go with plan A, we have plan B, C and D all worked out in case, but let's do it and see what happens and then adapt.

Oh, my gosh, those are such great words of wisdom. Thank you so much. I could stop here right now, I'd be like, call it a day. We're good. You made me laugh because of this. The view of perfectionism, a little bit personal here, but when my wife and I were dating, she was in the medical field and she would tell me every once in a while, I think you have a dose of clinical perfectionism. Is there such a thing? And I looked it up and there is not going too far into the medical definition of it. But I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I have a little bit. Yet she still married me. So like, okay, who's wrong here?

This job actually taught me how to be a different perfectionist and that's really helped me grow as well. Yeah, I know exactly where you're coming from. I just didn't know it had a label.

Yes, neither did I. One of the ways that we learn to be better course is in the reflection. Tell me, when did you start using this method of reflections either with your team or with yourself? Because I remember using the word postmortem, which was dreadful. But I love reflections. When did you start looking at them as a way to run integration?

We just started probably a couple years ago with adding to our process, this one year review. So after we've been integrating for a year, let's look back, see where we are so that we can improve on the next acquisition that we do. That's probably been in the last two years that we've done that because it's something I thought would help us learn more. And also because we had a lot of new people joining, it really helped the learning process. So that's kind of where it was born, let's say. And also because we got a lot of ins about, hey, why did this happen? Why did that happen? And we actually didn't have a lot of the answers. We had a lot of ideas of what the answers were, but we didn't validate those answers. So this helps us validate those answers with the business leader. So I think that's where that one year reflection came in. And when we do longer reflections, it's usually at the request of a business leader or looking at the value creation of what we've done. So the business leader would like to know, hey, we're kind. We're not doing what we said we were going to do. Can we look back and see where that happened and why that happened? It's more of an ad hoc thing to do, but I actually like doing it because you learn a lot about your diligence process at that point. Because three years is a nice time to look back and see, ooh, did I have that right? One year is a little bit short. Somewhere between two and three years is probably a good time to do that bigger retrospective to look at your diligence process and really improve that. The other thing I wanted to mention, because you said post mortem, you triggered Something one thing we did with one of the projects, that large integration project I worked on was a pre mortem. And there we looked at during the sign to close period because we sat in a huge antitrust, they had a look at everything. So we had a bunch of time. We sat with the team, not with the target, but with the business team and we sat down for three days and we went through a pre mortem exercise. We said what if this went wrong? What if that went wrong? And we applied a lot of that as things went wrong. So it was really nice to have that pre mortem at the start of a project, especially one of that size, because it was big. And it was very interesting to go back and look at that pre mortem. When I was writing the three year retrospective, as I won't call it a postmortem because I could use a lot of that information that was discussed during that pre mortem. So I thought that was a great idea to do. That was the idea of one of the business leaders at the time and I thought it was really powerful.

Oh my gosh, that's really cool. I don't think I've ever done a pre mortem. I don't like maybe creating a self fulfilling prophecy of failure. But tell me if I'm wrong here, which is it's not designed to be about failure. It's designed to be about how you succeed by avoiding the potential paths that could cause failure.

Yeah, totally. And I think it goes back to something I wanted to touch on, which is a scenario, planning, knowing what to do if A happens, what can be C&DB. I think it get just gives you some leverage. It's not, it's not a license to fail because I think that would be too easy. It's more. These are the things that can come into. Yeah, because you could see it as an excuse, right? You say, hey, I told you this was going to happen. But that's not how we used it. We used it really to predict or to have some ideas of what we think could happen from the vast experience that this business team had because I was just their program manager and my experience of I've seen programs fail and what is it. But these are coming from business leaders who know our customers, who know the product very well and had some really great insights and we really dissected it and it was very interesting to know also what we needed to prevent that. I really liked it. You could also argue are we a little bit too organized? Right. Are we looking at things too much before we're starting. Should we just go with the flow and see what happens? Which you could argue also could work very well in an integration. But I think to be honest, planning and being prepared to fail and reassessing and moving forward with a new plan is a much better way to do it than to not be prepared. Because not being prepared for an integration is just. There are so many things that are going to come up that for me, preparation is everything.

I agree. I'd like to ask just one qualifying question to that, which is preparation. I'm all about preparing, but there are different levels of preparing. Right. Preparing for a $5 billion acquisition versus a $5 million equal hire.

Yeah.

Do you find that your tendency around preparation tends to shift a little bit in terms of how much you enforce with your team as you look at one size versus the other?

Yeah, definitely. We'll look at how prepared do you need to be for a specific acquisition? Also how prepared do you need to be for a specific separation? So we definitely will tailor according to the impact. So it's not always price that's an impact. It can also be how much impact does it have to your customer base? Or how much impact does it have to your business? And then we'll tailor the preparation to that. So we want to make sure we're hitting all the important items in healthcare. It's very important to have your clinical quality and regulatory buttoned out and know what's happening. So that's one that we'll spend a lot of time on in preparation to make sure we're ready. Because you also need to be ready to sell. If you're doing a pre FDA approved acquisition of something and they're going into FDA approval, you need to make sure you have that all prepared and you're running a very tight ship with something like that. Whereas if it's something a little less intense, you can, you can go a little lighter on the preparation.

Yeah. I'll circle back to my earlier points around this idea of uncertainty. Right. And your ability to work with your business unit heads or the or other teammates to check and recheck that your logic is actually in fact correct. One of the things that I just wrote down here, which is your ability to ask these questions genuinely and in a timely manner, actually is a risk mitigation tactic, if I may say so, because it lets you recalibrate and re baseline where you might have to adjust the plan. Right. Because the plan you wrote six months ago for integration has some baked in uncertainty into it. But as we all know, for Those of us who've been around a while, sometimes you get sidetracked with something else that just wasn't factored in.

Covid. Totally.

You and I, we have lots of folks that we've interacted with over our careers and integration. This topic of scenario planning, I'd like to just ask one last question on it, because even for those who. Of those of us who've been around a while, and then maybe even a lesson learned for the new folks that are entering into a career in integration, scenario palling is a skill that is super important to learn very early. Maybe at some point MBA programs should have taught this as well, which is how do we better at it and look at the possible failures and the success factors and pathways. Is there a recommendation from you of how you would recommend, let's say, a new person in their integration career upskill themselves to be better at scenario planning or learn how to do it? Because I think this is a great lesson.

I think the how you can just learn from experience, but I think the why is really important. So why do you need to have different scenarios? And I think if you understand that, that can help. Actually read this book that was recommended by one of our chief finance leaders called Synchronicity by Joseph Jabarsky. He was a scenario planner at Shell, I believe, if I got it right, also did a lot of other stuff. But one of the things he did was scenario planning. And in his book, it's a leadership book, so it's about something totally different. But they talk a little bit about scenario planning and why it was important. That was the one part of the book that really helped me to understand why scenario planning is so important. I think it shifted my perspective of why we need to do it. When you understand the why, it'll help you in the how to plan because you have an understanding of what are the inputs that are going to lead to the different outputs. And then doing that is just, yeah, part of thinking critically about how to approach something. So that's kind of how I see it.

That's great. Okay, audience. Synchronicity by Joseph Tawarsky. Another piece of homework for all of you. I'm an adjunct professor, so I love giving out homework. All right, Stacy, there's just such a wealth of information. You've been so wonderful. But I do want to do quick speed round, if I may, just a quick set of questions that the audience kind of gets to know Stacey Von Chag and Tobac a little bit better. What is the craziest thing you've seen in M and A. Yeah.

So I have two answers to this question. One is it's not really crazy, but surprising is that the assumption just of integration just kind of happens. I think there's this like idea that integration just happens without a lot of the planning. So that's a little bit surprising, but I think the craziest thing I've ever seen at M and A and this is something we encountered. We were doing a acquisition and we really, we did an asset deal and we realized that we had a contract with rental cars and that there were people that had these rental cars. And the day that we closed, they would no longer be insured because there'd be this liability. So we had to figure out, working like through the night how we're going to exchange these rental cars. So that's kind of like a crazy thing you find out during an integration. So I thought it was very interesting. We did it. We got it all organized without any liabilities. But it was something you just didn't expect.

Oh my gosh. That's a nuance that you don't really expect. I agree.

Those are the details. And the details.

I'm glad you mentioned that because I think it's really important for those clinical perfectionists like in us, details are really important. Next speed question is what is your M and A superpower?

I think the breadth of knowledge that I have from my experience from the multiple functions and industries, I really think that helps. First of all, it gives a lot of confidence in when I give answers and it helps to become a trusted advisor to the business leader. Acquiring. So I think that's what I would call my superpower.

I love it. Being a trusted advisor to the company that you're acquiring. I love it. And actually similar to that point. So last speed question, based on your international experience and having worked with many leaders across the world, what skills would you recommend? Or maybe the younger integration folks who are looking to upskill themselves into an international role. How would you look at somebody? Who would you bring onto your team?

Sensitivity to cultures and emotional IQ is really important. Also look for structured problem solvers. So you can be a problem solver like an innovator, but not be very structured in that. And I think that's very important. So trusting your instincts, so knowing that you can trust yourself to make a decision and what's really important is willingness to learn and accept that you won't know everything. I think those are really key concepts, especially when you're working internationally and everything's going to be different than you expected.

Stacy thank you.

Thank you.

I had an amazing time with you. Everyone. Please, a round of applause for Stacey Van Schagen Tobak. It's been a wonderful amount of information we've collected from you and the contribution to the community. We really appreciate everything that you've done for us today. So from M and A Science everyone, thank you very much. Have a great day.

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