Virtual Summit Recap: Virtualizing the People Experience During Integration

Hello M and A Friends. I recently published a book that introduces a science based framework to managing M and A. This is a collection of proven techniques to develop a responsive and adaptive approach to M and A. The best part is you can view the whole book online completely free. Check it out@agilema.com and look for new plays coming soon. Also, if you like this podcast, please tell a friend we're looking to build the largest community of forward thinking M and A practitioners. On to the interview. I'm Kisan Patel and you're listening to M and A Science where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during MA deals. This interview is a rewind from our Virtual Summit. Hope you enjoy it. If you want to see the full version with video, visit mascience.com I'm going.

To introduce this upcoming topic Virtualizing the People Experience During Integration. Please join me in welcoming our speakers. Laura Lane, GTM Strategy and Execution Chief of Staff of M and A at VMware Kimberly Baird, corporate Development Integration Lead at Cisco and Dawn White, Manager of M A Integration Corporate Development at Corning Inc.

Thanks for the introduction Maddie and for the opportunity Kisan and Maddie to moderate this session today. So my name is Laura Lane. I'm actually not leading M and A at VMware. I used to be in M&A at VMware. Right now I'm in the end User Computing or Employee Experience Solutions organization leading sales strategy and Chief of Staff for the UC America Sales leader. But I do have a history in M and A. I started at Xilin in the late 90s where I was asked by the CFO to lead the development of a new corporate development function. I partnered with a technical person to do that. That's where I learned, I think more of the front office side of M and A. We didn't do much on integration at that time and then I moved on to Oracle and led finance integrations for several years and during that time I actually acquired my own company and got some experience with putting in an earn out and tsa. What was interesting is I did that but then my whole lifestyle and priorities changed and I had to then figure out how to sell it to the right buyer to take care of the customer. So that was an interesting life experience. After Oracle I moved over to VMware where we were doing a number of divestitures and I helped lead the divestitures from the corporate perspective, helped them build the case for a global go to market M and A lead role which I then took on and led for several years. And so now, like I mentioned, I'm in the Employee Experience Solutions organization where M and A is a key use case for our solutions. So I continue to remain engaged in M and A. So I wanted to just tee off the topic for today and then I'll turn it over to Kimberly and Dawn. We're going to talk about virtualizing the people experience in M and A. And you know, everyone knows that M and A is challenging in the best of circumstances, but now that we're in this pandemic situation and we're having to do everything virtually for the foreseeable future, we're really having to rethink our processes and we want to still keep an eye on the most important aspect of integration, which is the people experience and the culture integration. So I'm delighted to talk to both Kimberly and Dawn today about how Corning and Cisco take this on and what they're doing. These, these two ladies have many more years than myself and M and A and so I'm proud to be moderating this session on their behalf. So I'll turn it over to Kimberly to introduce herself.

Hi everybody, I'm Kimberly. Thank you so much, Laura. I actually, I don't think I have more MA experience than you. I have been at, I have been at Cisco almost 20 years now, which I can't believe it's been that long already. It's been such a fun journey. I joined the M and A practice about four and a half years ago and have had the privilege of leading acquisitions and divestitures on behalf of corporate development in order to meet our value drivers and our objectives that we set forth. Before that I had a myriad of functional roles and responsibilities and I have had the opportunity at Cisco to change roles and functions over that 20 year period, which has been really cool. And every time that I made a change, I really looked at how can I drive more business value and transform and build teams through that process. My passion is really around building teams. So the people experience is at the perfect intersection of my passion in terms of working with people both individually and then as a team, and then also their change management experience when they're purchased by a company like Cisco or the other way at Divestiture. By the way, just a call out to the last panel session. I only got the last bit of it. That sounded like a really good one and very close to my heart with Syves being a very challenging people experience, that's it for me. I'm looking Forward to this session. Kiesen, thank you so much for the opportunity. Couldn't have a better set of colleagues on my panel. Dawn, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Hello, everyone. My name is Dawn White. I've been at Cornea for about nine years now. I. But I've only been working in the M and A space for four years. I helped lead the launch of our M and A Center of Excellence, and our center brings together the professionals from all across different functions and businesses, and we work together to identify and implement the best practices, and we actively support the integrations out in the field. Early integration, stage planning, all of that integration was our main focus when we launched, but we recently have made a decision to expand into due diligence and change management. And so I am especially excited about that because I specialize in change management and stigma process improvement before I joined the corporate Development Group. So it's really just an exciting time for us and I'm just happy to be here and share any type of wisdom or knowledge that can help anyone out in the field. So thank you, Kisan MNA Science, for inviting me here.

Thanks, Kimberly. Thanks, Dawn. Okay, so I'm going to launch our first polling question, and this is about, you know, really, how would you describe your level of M and A activity since the onset of COVID 19? Okay, so while I've launched this poll, I'll just say at VMware, we're still acquiring companies. We've actually announced the acquisition of three companies since the start of 2020 last year. We were very acquisitive in the prior year. So even though we might not be doing anything big, we're still making acquisitions. So I would love to hear from Kimberly what your acquisition activity is over at Cisco.

It's been about the same, Laura. We had many deals in the pipeline that are still going through. We haven't seen anything stopped as a result of COVID 19 at this point in time. And we are looking at more investments. I would say about the same.

Okay, thank you.

And dawn, so for us at Quorinate, I would say our M and A activity has slowed down tremendously. And I would say, especially on the front end, you know, where we target new deals and conduct the due diligence, I think we are even now more cautious about the deals we consider. There's a lot of uncertainty out there, and just like most companies. Right. We're trying to hold onto our cash. But I will say with the slowdown of our active integrations, our center of Excellence has taken this time to focus on continual improvements efforts within our center and across all of our functions. And I feel like our website that houses all of our best practice documentations and tools as a self service toolkit. So to say, we know that like one common pitfall around COEs is to not keep information updated and current. Right. So we have always, I think, been proactive at just having a schedule and a regimen around going in there and updating that material. But now we're looking a little deeper. For example, one of our tools is a lessons learned database. We're taking this time to go back and look through that database because we have over like 2,000 different experiences that cover like the last 15 years. And there's probably at least maybe 20 different acquisitions on there. But we know right off the bat that we need to go in there and add that column around M and a timing and phase because we wanted to distinguish when did this experience happen, Was it due diligence, was it integration? And then if it was integration, was it day one, day 30, day 100? And then like I said, with 2,000 different experiences, which ones are really important. So it's just things like that that we're taking the time out to do right now.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Especially at this point. You really look at your processes. You know, we talked in preparing for the session that this is people. Then when this first happened, it was how did we just respond, how do we react, Current set of activities. And now that we've had a couple of months under our belt, like, what did we learn from that? You know, going forward, how do we then rethink this entire process? So it's going to be like a theme throughout today is, you know, react rethinking to take this practice forward, given things will never really be the same going forward. I wanted to ask though, Kimberly and Dawn, since you have some activity going on anyway, what's gone on with say the costs and the timelines, has there been any impact?

Well, if you don't mind, Laura, I'd like to talk a little bit about the react mode that we had during COVID 19.

Sure, absolutely.

Like I said, we do have a lot of activity in the pipeline. When COVID 19 hit in earnest as a global health crisis and we realized, oh, there's not going to be any travel. Like all these things happened super fast with the shutdown. We had deals in diligence, we had deals in announce phase, we had deals in onboarding, we had deals in TSA exit, all were impacted and we had to react accordingly. I think that was an amazing and interesting time in terms of being able to respond very quickly to the changes at hand and still try to keep the momentum of the business going and the transactions that we had in play moving forward. We were really fortunate to have a very pervasive collaboration tool capability with Cisco WebEx. We used that, we leveraged that. I think it was from the outside, sort of seamless, but internally, it was like a lot of really fast thinking to try to respond quickly and to try our best to uphold the employee experience through that process or the target experience in the case of diligence, for example.

Yeah, I bet you have some interesting lessons learned there.

Yeah, we're still learning. We're definitely learning from it.

What do you think the employee experience was during where you had to pivot? Did you get feedback from the employee experience perspective?

We have. We've gotten some feedback. I mean, I'll just give one example that was really touching. I mean, everybody realizes how drastically COVID 19 took over and took over all of our lives very quickly. We had a deal that was announcing in Italy, right when Italy had shut down, was at the worst of their health crisis. It was really important to us that we showed empathy, and we tried to make that connection as much as possible with the people and the country. In Italy, we had our sales leaders play a role there, our country leaders play a role there and really help try to shepherd that conversation with the target. I mean, the majority of the people at that company were just finding out they were being purchased at that time. Right. It's a huge, huge change for you personally, for your family, all of those things in the midst of the global health crisis that was happening to the country, which was completely unprecedented. So I'll just say we tried. I don't know that it was perfect, but we tried to be empathetic. We also had a deal that was onboarding in Australia at that time. We had people ready to get on a plane from the US To Australia to help with the personalized onboarding that we normally do. And we had to quickly change that. It was minute by minute who was canceling reservations, who was on the ground in Australia that could possibly help us. And the team pulled together a solution so that those employees were still able to do their personalized onboarding at that time. Because in Australia at that time, we were able to do that. And then, of course, now, looking forward, we're looking to virtualize that entire process.

Thank you for sharing that. So let me actually show the poll Results for the first question, a lot of folks are saying there is a significant decrease in the amount of M and A activity or about the same and a slight decrease. Very few have said significant increase.

And that's kind of our situation at Corning. I think we've had a significant decrease. But when Covid hit, we didn't have a bunch of live integrations going anywhere. We just had one and it had been going for a while, remember, like I said. So we were working on like a lot of projects. Even with that, a lot of our employees were put on like reduced work week schedules. And so that has directly, you know, impacted our project timelines. How much we don't know yet. We're still trying to figure this thing out. Right. But we absolutely expect to see an extension on a lot of our timelines there.

Yeah. Kimberly, you had talked about this as well when we were chatting about this yesterday. Do you think that the prolonged timelines or maybe the increased costs are something you would then build into your plans going forward?

Absolutely. Like I said, we're still learning. So as we're implementing, for example, virtualized onboarding experience for employees, instead of that hand holding kind of classroom environment that we normally did or have done in the past, we're seeing the forecasting, more IT resources, more sessions required because we're opting to try to create the best possible employee experience to get them productive as soon as possible. And that means we're making those sessions smaller. We're going to be taking them step by step through WebEx collaboration. We'll be helping them to do what they need to do on their computers. Obviously there's different logistical challenges sending laptops to homes and making sure they get there. And like all sorts of more backend discipline. I would say that it's actually shown pervasively across all the different deals. We just have to be more disciplined, more documentation, more time, more thoughtfulness because we're changing the way we do things. Hopefully we'll be able to optimize that over time. But when you're first learning and adopting and creating new process, it inadvertently takes more time and money.

Yeah, makes total sense. All right, so I'm going to go into the next question now, which is a lot of times when you're in an in person meeting, let's say you're having a due diligence meeting on site or you're doing an integration planning meeting, you can really, you have a better chance of reading people how they're feeling, what their thoughts are by their body language. All the Non verbal cues. When I was to our head of integration for VMware, he was saying that's a skill he has, right? That he really has leveraged over years and now he has to. Video is fantastic. And no doubt everybody would agree video is better than nothing. But how do you read a room in this situation to know if you're on point or people are having a negative reaction to what you're saying? And I'd love to hear from you, like, since you've had a couple of months of experience doing this, what are some of the lessons learned or thoughts you have around how to build trust and build that connection?

I would just say that video conferencing is a skill and it takes time. If you have been extraordinarily successful in your interpersonal relationships and you've relied on that for your professional career, it's going to be hard to make that change. I've been fortunate in that I've had a remote work environment for a while, so I've had lots of practice. But I think for people it's challenging and having, you know, working with toddlers crawling all over you and all these different challenges that we've had. And to your point, reading a room, I don't have the answer on that. I mean, certainly I've seen you, Laura. I'm seeing you, Don. I'm not seeing the rest of the audience. And it's hard to know whether or not you're connecting. I think just being as natural as you can be and as engaging as you can see is probably the best you can do. And I think there's a lot of know using your collaboration software to the fullest extent could help. I think there's an opportunity for more enhancements to collaboration software and for us to be a little bit more engaged. With that being said, I think we talked a lot about people starting off meetings with how are you? And really having more connection, which you can do in a smaller setting. But when you're presenting to a large audience, like for example, if you're announcing your intent to acquire a company, it's tough. Right. So I think taking those opportunities to have the smaller audiences might be a good way to do it. But in general, when you have a session where it's a big session, that's a challenge.

Thanks. I know dawn has a lot to share on this topic.

Well, I don't know if there's a lot, but. So for us, our core CoE team was already working remotely. Right. We sit in different locations across the. So it wasn't A big change for us. As far as the support team for M and A that either work in the businesses, I suspect a few of them were even working virtually. So that's not a big difference. You know, we've always had, you know, the WebEx tool, the Skype for business and all of that. But what I will say is that I don't think we always use the communication tools to their full capability. And by that I mean, like in our culture, we. We really don't use our video cameras much for meetings. Right. But now since more and more people are working remotely, we see different leaders. Project managers are not asking their employees to turn on your camera, Turn on your camera so we can see you. Let us connect in that way. And I think that's important because a lot of people like to be able to look people in their eyes when they're talking to them so they can get this good read on them. Right. I think this new direction is great and I think it will go a long way in getting us to feel like we know one another better. Because I just know for me, there have been so many times where I have either had email correspondence back and forth or talked on the phone to an individual that I've never seen. And then maybe it's a corporate or work event and we run into each other and I'm just so excited to finally put that face with the name. And I'm like, yeah, I remember you. And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then next time when we are in maybe a meeting again, I just feel so much more. I feel like we have a better rapport. So for me, I just, I'm loving the video interactions. I just wish I could get more people to love it.

Great points. I know our team and our sales team I support, we are all on video or if it's 6am, I'm not on video, are definitely getting to know each other better. And I think that's definitely been the silver lining. So I'm going to share the polling results for how the folks on the line feel about the communication of their companies. So we'd asked the question about what has been the most difficult aspect of communication for you, working virtually? And you'll see the number one response has been business as usual for me. Interesting. Second, being connected with colleagues or connected with colleagues. Third, ensuring my opinion is heard and truly considered.

So. Right, Laura? So when I see that, that kind of tells me that we probably have a lot of people already working in the M and A field who are already remote or had that flexibility to work from home, which is a good thing, you know. And then I saw the one at the top that says, just feeling connected. And I can actually see that, too. Cause I know for our Skype for Business tool, you know, usually on that tool, like, you're pinging people. And usually people would only feel comfortable pinging people that they have a rapport with, you know, that they have a relationship with. But now I see I'm getting pings from strangers, right? People wanna reach you, and they, you know, they can't walk over to your desk anymore or come to your office feeling quite empowered to say, hey, even though I don't know you, I'm going to ping you and try to get to you right away versus waiting these three days. So, yeah, I see people doing extra to stay closer.

Yeah. Kimberly, any thoughts on that?

I agree. It's been a really interesting time. I think when you're doing acquisitions, you need to consider the culture of the company that you're acquiring. Right. And don't make assumptions. I think there's differences in the way people interact and their comfort level with the collaboration software and, you know, the culture. Like you're saying at Corning, maybe it's less video at this point, but changing quickly. And I think we just need to consider that as we, as we're M and A professionals, as we make our first impressions with Target during diligence and that kind of thing, as well as when we make our first impressions with the employees and just try to consider that kind of level of change that everybody's going through during that time. I will say that. And I think one of the things we were going to touch on is leadership, and then we could pivot to that next. But I found at Cisco, we have really had a much closer relationship with our leadership over this time. They've been working with us, having company meetings on a weekly basis. I personally feel like I know our executive leadership team much more intimately than I did before, having seen right into their houses and, you know, dogs and things like that that, you know, you would never see normally, and then taking it down into the team. We've worked hard. I think one of the polling responses talked about interacting with colleagues, at least in our company. We put a real specific emphasis on trying to get together and get to know each other. And as a result, in my own team, we have a, you know, a chat room going that we never had before. We have weekly sessions. We did a really fun event where we. We all said, okay, we're going to one of our friends is going to teach us how to make Jeremy Sue. We had like a kitchen session where, you know, 20 or so of us took his instructions and tried to make tiramisu, and some of us had our kids involved and things like that. And it was like a really neat thing to do. So I think we just need to be thinking outside the box on how we connect, and I think we can bring that into our MA practice as well.

I love that I wanted to segue into the leadership conversation now then. So I love all of Kisan's interviews he's done on his podcast. One in particular I listened to recently was with Susan Isley and she runs Isley Associates. And she talked about how critical leadership is in the M and A process and that not every leader embodies all things that a great leader would have. But she talked about particularly around it's ideal if a leader has had personal experience being acquired. So they have that empathy and knowledge of what that feels like. People trust them, they walk the talk, they're highly influential, they're very deliberate and they're galvanizing. And as you can see, that's a lot to expect from any one leader. But let's say your company is new to acquisitions or you have new leaders getting involved in acquisitions. Share with me a little bit about how your company goes about developing them. So not just throwing a training at them the day of, but how do you develop leaders over time? Time to become more effective in leading M and A integrations, Our workforce development.

And learning group, which is a part of our HR function, they really spent a lot of time to develop this M and A leadership portal, right? Because just like you said, different leaders have different background experiences and different levels of expertise and dealing with people and all of that. So they really sat down and thought about, if I'm a leader in M and A, how might I touch the companies that acquire employees? So we said, there's the perspective of you're the Corning leader, right? And your division or group is purchasing, bringing in a company. So we developed a set of materials that taught specifically the things that needs to be on their radar, actions they can take to be more effective. And then we thought about that leader. That's what the acquired company that's coming on board. And we realized that not only do they have to help transition their employees, and they're working with executives at the top level with Corning, so they have a lot more things to worry about. So we wrote down a lot of things that they should be having on their radar. And then we thought about that supervisor, that frontline supervisor who is at the acquired company. They may have 100, 200 employees and they're swept up in this chain. And you know, sometimes at that level, you don't even always get privy to a lot of the key communications or circumstances surrounding a deal, but you still still have to manage that group of people through this transition. We set up all this information to where, yes, it could be self service and we make sure we put it in front of you to go look at it. But we also tried to build into our learning assignments that hey leader, you should get in front of the employees and go through this with them. Yeah, we understand that it's virtual now and when we designed it, we originally thought it would happen in person, but either way we, we just didn't want leaders going in there reading it, but we wanted them to really embrace what's in there and then go to the new employees and talk to them about it. So yeah, that's one thing we've done.

Excellent. Kimberly, what do you think?

Everything dawn said I completely agree with and I think is a great way to go about it. I wanted to kind of connect my response back to some of the strategy sessions in yesterday's panel. First of all, the alignment between leadership, right between the acquirer and the target company and really having those sometimes tough conversations about what are the outcomes we're looking to drive with this transaction and getting alignment. And then I think my job as an integration lead is then to help foster that conversation to ensure that the leaders of the target company are then helping to bring along the team with the strategies. That way you are managing the people experience, utilizing the leadership that's in place and their trust that they have implicitly in their leaders. So that's one part of it. Coupled with that, we set forward value drivers for our deals around retention, around key employees and for those key employees which are most likely the founders, but sometimes not. Sometimes they are very specific technical luminaries that we want to make sure are set up for success. Inside of Cisco, we put our people and communities team, works with us with the deal team with the target leadership, etc. To formulate what kind of training and help does that person need. And there's sort of like a mentoring situation set up where we connect them with mentors, we connect them with a founder's community that we foster inside of Cisco of all the founders. It's called the Founders Forum, and we work with them on a consistent basis to Continue to capture ideas and get really clear feedback from them on how can Cisco improve, where are we going wrong, that kind of thing. So we try to engage those leaders over time with mixed results. I mean, some of these folks are entrepreneurs and they go off and start their next new company. That's it happens. But others we've seen go through the rank. One of our newest senior leaders in the executive leadership team is Todd Nightingale, who was the lead for Meraki as they came into Cisco. So it's neat to see some of those leaders really shape our company. We find that to be very important. One in five Cisco employees are a result of an acquisition. So it's a core part of our culture.

Both of your companies have taken the aspect of leadership very seriously and invested in this, the next topic. And I've heard this as the times I've been able to listen in on the summit this last couple of days. There's a huge theme around culture integration and change management. Back to what makes a deal successful. People experience culture integration, change management, leadership, all key aspects. And when people seek change, it's one thing, but when change is imposed upon them, it's completely different. And then when they've got pandemic situation happening at the same time and a lot of other things happening with the social injustice issues and there's just a lot going on right at this particular time. I know that both of you have experience in this area. I'm going to start with Dawn. I know she specializes in culture integration, cultural assessment. So dawn, why don't you share how you handle this at Corning?

I totally agree. What's going on now in today's time, this is the prime time for I think change management to get us due respect. Right? Because to me, just like in regular project management change management, it just sometimes gets forgotten and it's especially forgotten in M and A when the focus is so much on reaching deal objectives and you know, reaching those number targets. Right. But now you see everyone from the top down realizing, hey, we must do more, we have to do more to ensure that our employees understand the numerous changes that are taking place throughout the company and actually throughout the world and how those broadly changes are impacting the company. Right. So for me, I just see there's a greater appreciation for it and people realize we need to have a formal change management framework in place, a formal M and A change management in place because the M and A focus is much different. And to me what's important there is to have a framework that any of the due diligence leaders or integration leaders can follow or execute and not have to have a change management leader at the helm, you know, because we all know that not a lot of companies are able to invest in that change management expert to do that. Even though we would love to see that happen, it's just not a reality. So if nothing else, still have tools there to help assist the other leaders. Right. And when I talk about change management from the M and a perspective, to me it's just more about taking a structured approach. Right. To managing the people side. You hear pro side always say the people side of change. Right. And yes. And then exercise intentional thought on how our actions as a company come together with other factors going on in the world to change the way we're asking people to work things, we're asking them to do differently. And I really think that's important in today's time because not only do we have to keep our pause on the acquired employees that's coming on board. Right. People pretty much know that and do a good job at that, you know. Well, most of the time. But then you also have to monitor the current employees because although they're not going through a transition or being acquired, they are part of the experience of bringing these new employees to the company and they're dealing with all the other factors that is going on in the world. There are a lot of cultural shifts to me and mindsets. Right. People are just thinking differently and even like what our due diligence stages, there's virtual tools out there that we can use and that we absolutely need to start using if we're not simple tools like Glassdoor. Let's look on there and see what the employees are saying about that work culture. Let's see what the employees are saying about that experience there. Maybe we can gain some insight into this company. And then you have the social media sites like Twitter and Instagram where you get like real time feedback. People are getting bold and they're saying things directly to the CEO. And I think a lot of that is a result too of kind of being thrust into this time where you have to be comfortable with technology. You have to get out and do a little bit more. How I'll say is a lot of people are getting bold, they're getting comfortable and they're feeling like, yeah, I can get on here and say something. And I just think that is much different than what a lot of CEOs are used to dealing with. They're not used to having that public scrutiny just happen so fast and so quick. And when it happens, society wants to hear from you. They want to hear what is your response. You know, what are you going to do? Right? So, like just the other day I was reading that story about CrossFit, you know, the company who oversees that annual athletic competition. They were negotiating a new deal with Reebok, right? And then their CEO, he went on social media and just made a whole lot of comments that were just inappropriate. And they tore him up. Right? They just went after him. And so Reebok stopped the deal. And then on top of that, right after Reebok had already stopped the deal, some private conversations, I guess, that were happening in their Zoom tool got published to the public. And that was so bad that he ended up resigning and walking away. And then on the flip side of that, you had Reebok, who was in talks with Beyonce a few years ago, you know, the singer Beyonce, she was going to come up with a product line, but when she went to the meetings to talk about what that deal would look like, she asked them, you know, is everyone in the room? Are these the people who are going to work on my product? And they said yes. And she said, well, none of these people look like me. So they were stunned, and they were probably caught off guard, I'm sure. So for her, it was important to have people coming to the table to be a part of the deal that looked like her. So I just see that you have all this change going on, and to me, I think this is a great time to be a change management professional. And that is if you're good at it now, if you're not good, then you're gonna be in trouble. But if you're good and you know what you're doing out here, this is a great opportunity.

You touched on so many different areas there this morning. The first topic was around diversity and inclusion in M and A. And I thought that was very interesting, especially since we focus so much on improving our diversity at VMware. We look at that when we're doing an acquisition. Say if we're acquiring a predominantly male organization or if there's very few underrepresented minorities represented in the company. That's very interesting. You also mentioned Glassdoor. Every employee, they're your number one brand ambassadors.

Yeah.

Whatever is happening in your company, if they're feeling, usually it's when they're not happy, they'll post on Glass.

Yeah.

Great place to look and find out what people think about, say, your M and A practice and how you made them. During an M and A Dawn you made some great points. And after I talked to Kimberly here, I wanted to show the other polling question about or the question that we just got in Q and A about video. Now, you said, use your collaboration tools more extensively. Use all the facets of them. How do you get people to turn their video on? How do we get them to use the full capability? You can take this wherever you want to go, Kimberly. But I just want to bring that up too. If you wanted to touch upon, how do you encourage that increased level of collaboration with the tools that great.

Well, anyone that's been on my team knows that I kind of pick on them if they don't. I think guilt works sometimes, but I think people generally follow the lead of the leaders. Right. So lead by example. You go to a meeting, you're always on video. People to pay attention. Oh, she's on video all the time. I mean, I think it's a slow process, maybe accelerated by Covid, which hopefully is good. But I think that, yeah, leading by example is probably the primary way of sharing. I've been on many meetings where I get on. On video and suddenly cameras start turning on, right? Oh, okay, we're going to do it this way. And then people apologize like, oh, I'm still my workout clothes, or I'm not going to go on video because of this or that reason. And it's like, okay, that's fine. You know, everybody's in a different place. We're having to be flexible in a lot of different ways. I know that at Cisco, a lot of my colleagues, it feels like our work has just exponentially increased. We're just constantly on video calls. It's even impacting our lives in a really different way. Don, you touched on so many different things that were all really great stories. I love the CrossFit story. I mean, I think it's sort of the opportunity and the fear of having that instant reaction in the market because of something you do wrong. It's super scary. But it's also an opportunity. It's an opportunity, especially from an inclusion perspective of hearing everyone's voices and being. It takes a lot of courage to, I think, realize that, oh, wow, we're operating in a bubble and we need to be more vulnerable and really take things as they come. I think if you just try to have integrity and try to do the right thing, you will come out okay. Probably the reason why I've been at Cisco for 20 years is I really feel comfortable with the culture and the values of the company that I'm at. And I think that's important for everybody. And so it's important when you're looking at M and A and that cultural, you know, taking a look at the culture of the company that's coming in as well as their perspectives and then really being thoughtful about the change you're asking them to go through. They didn't choose to be bought, most of them, so you try to do that with thoughtful intent.

Kimberly, I totally agree because I always like to like coming together of companies. Kind of like a marriage, right? You get two people don't know each other. Only difference is usually in a marriage you get to date a little bit. And then our transactions, the dating doesn't last that long and it has to go really quick and you have to make it decision. Then you come together. You got people with two different personalities, like you got companies with two different personalities. You have to bring them together and make it work. That's tough. And we know what the divorce rate is out here, so you can just imagine what it looks like for M and A, right?

Absolutely. Let's talk about day one onboarding and the employee experience in the context of processes and systems, for example, or even collaboration tools. At VMware and Dell, our partner and many of our customers, they leverage a platform that allows the employees to have on day one access to all their legacy apps and new apps from the new acquiring company, as well as all the information from the intranet. Frictionless is awesome. I think even, well, I know even Dell is drop shipping fully configured laptops to employees. And you imagine for acquired employees where you don't have to deal with all the reimaging and it's a touch free or touchless process. And we know that those types of things really improve an employee's experience if they can be productive on day one, if they can continue that business momentum they had before the deal happened, just makes everyone really happy and feel good. Also, collaboration platforms at VMware, we're more about choice. So if you were using Slack, you can continue using Slack. We are moving to teams as a company, but either way, the platform that we have enables your ability to leverage whatever collaboration platform you'd like to use. That's your preference. So I'd love to hear from each of you around processes and tools and collaboration platforms. What does your company do? I'll start with Kimberly.

We primarily use WebEx, which maybe a lot of people don't know has a lot of capabilities like chat, like instant meeting setup, instant video calls with colleagues. So we've used that platform pervasively and we're always trying to improve there. The other thing that we do for employees coming on board is we have a website that's specifically created for them and based on where they are in their experience at that given time. So for example, if they just finished a Benefits session, the PowerPoint from that session will be posted, the subject matter expert will be highlighted. Hey, ask, you know, ask Lynn a question about this. And they're able to take a look at the checklist of things that they have upcoming that they need to do to get productive or to get squared away on their benefits and that kind of thing. And that's how we kind of foster them through the process in the first several months of an integration.

Excellent Dawn.

For us at Corning, it's two collaboration tools that kind of come to mind. And we use the Citrix software to give our newly acquired employees access to them before day one when they may not be on our systems yet. Right. So the first one is called Blue Line and it's like an internal Facebook platform for employees where we could post messages, photos, videos and documents. We can give them star ratings and likes. And it's made up of a lot of different communities on this Blue Line page. And so we have an M and A community. And to be honest, we haven't always used our M and A community to as well as potential, you know, a lot of us on our team, we're not into the social media thing, so it was kind of tough for us to go out there. But we have made a commitment to start doing better there and really make use of this. So we're going to start just posting maybe some thought provoking M and A topics, share reads from external M and A organizations, advertise conferences and trainings, things like that. And also on our last major acquisition, we actually used it to have a private community for the acquired company. Things we went over say on the day one onboarding, you know, it's a lot of information, right? You have people sitting there for hours, it's hard to retain all that. So we put some of the key presentations on there so they could go back and retrieve it. Our integration leaders are also on this private board with them. So if employees have a question about anything integration wise or business or transaction, anything, they could kind of go in there and type and we'll respond. And then if they just want to say hi, we had them getting on there saying hi, my name is so and so. I'm glad to be a part of Corning. And I just thought that was awesome. So we've had great success with that tool. And then another tool that we're using I think which is more for like the project teams integration, due diligence Teams is box. And what box is is a tool that manages and development. It manages the storage of communications. Right. It's a cloud based solution and it just makes it easier to collaborate across teams, customers, partners and vendors. You can share documents internally or externally. It keeps version controls and you know how crazy that can be on an M and a team with different people touching documents. So we found great success using that and then also has the security controls because as you know, with a lot of M and A documentation, you know it's sensitive data in there. So we're able to put security controls on various documents.

These are so many great ideas. I hope it goes without saying you can contact either of us after the session today if you want to learn more about our practices. One thing I wanted to go back to is when we started the conversation off, we were talking about when we found out about the pandemic and we were more in a reaction phase. And then we're reflecting. Now we're in this rethinking. How do we rethink our process going forward? VMware, we are looking at new tools. So VMware is rolling out something internal to do virtual reality for say customer advisory boards. We could probably use it for workshopping and whiteboarding. So we're looking at that. There's another company that a partner of ours that's very focused on employee experience and they have this whole methodology of how to identify what motivates employees that they're building into their virtual reality. Secure, highly secure platform that anyone can then use. Replicate scale. Lower cost certainly than flying people in to create avatar based but lifelike abilities to do employee experience workshopping or M and a workshopping. So I love the direction that's heading. I'm not usually an early adopter of things, but our company right now is using in sales. We're trying to figure out how to do whiteboarding, say with a product called Miro or PowerPoint whiteboarding. And I just wonder what the two of you are thinking about since we are going to remain in this kind of new normal. What do you think you need to do from a technology perspective going forward.

For us at Corning? I'll start by saying we're not as fancy as you guys with the virtual reality capability. We're not there yet, but we are in the midst of launching our own homegrown virtual interacting Onboarding module, we call it Become Corny. And this virtual forum, it just brings together the key aspects of the company that we want employees to walk away with. We allow them to pick and select the materials or the info based on their needs and interests. Last I knew, we had plans to add a landing page on there for newly acquired employees to go on there and maybe see a message from the general manager from their business. Welcome message. They can go in there and see a listing of who's who on the integration team. They can go there to find out who to contact in it. We put FAQs around their deal or integration plans, their benefits. We're going to use this module to put everything there and let them go there and interact with it.

That's excellent, Kimberly.

Like I said, we have a lot of deals going through that we're learning from. And one of the things that I've learned from being in M and A is you have to learn through experience and actually going through the deals and then reflecting on what you've learned, applying that to the next one. So I would just say we're open to new ideas. I think the virtual reality idea is really interesting. We're like many other people, I think, searching for the best possible experience considering the new constraints we're put under currently. I wouldn't say I have like some new tool to tell everybody about, but certainly we're open as well as we're looking very hard at digitizing our internal processes to just continue to optimize as we have the time to reflect.

Looking forward to staying in touch with both of you on this. One of the fun areas we talked about and I think we touched upon it earlier, being online is very different than being in a room with people and it kind of removes the hierarchy that you might feel when you're sitting with senior leaders in the room and you feel like you need to kind of follow their lead. So one of the things I heard from some folks that lead go to Market M and A at VMware, the online aspect is letting people be more open. I mean, the word blunt was used, but it wasn't used in a negative way. It was more just open and not concerned as much about saying something that's opposing to what say a senior executive would say. What have you two noticed with this? I know you mentioned earlier people are being friendlier and they're starting the conversations off differently. What else would you like to share on this?

I haven't seen a big change personally. At Corning, we have a very polite culture But I love that it's happening other places that people are standing up. You know, I know when we had collected the voice of the customer on one of our due diligence projects, a functional lead has shared how they just did not feel comfortable challenging certain decisions of the senior deal team members. And that was interesting to me because, you know, I'm prior military, right? So I came up in a work culture where you are encouraged to speak up as long as it's in a respectful way. You know, that kind of established you as a leader to be able to speak up. But I know people are different. You know, we all have different backgrounds, different personalities. So for me, I don't have a problem sharing my opinion, but I do see that as a problem, you know, especially when we had teams face to face. I remember a time when I was working with a very, very senior executive and I was leading the vendor selection process, and we had all these VPs and directors in the room working with us. At the end, when I was asking them, what do you think about this? Who do you want to go with? Or just any question, pretty much, they, to me, would always align up with whatever the senior person said during one of the breaks. I had to go ask him, would he please, please just wait to answer and say his opinion until they speak? Because I said, we have all these Senior people, experts, SMEs in the room and we have no idea what they really think. Because whatever you say, they're jumping on it like it's golden. He appreciated that. He absolutely obliged and we saw the difference and we got that feedback and interaction there.

I'll keep it really short. I just, I love Don's story so much. I thought that was great. I would just say that people have been a bit more transparent. I think that the barriers that we normally suit up with drive to work, go to the office, you know, interact in a certain way. Those barriers have been taken down by the fact that we're all in our homes and we're subject to the lawnmowers going outside and the sirens going by or whatever is happening around us. So I think it's made people a little bit more approachable and also a little more willing to speak up because everyone's in a discomfort kind of role right now. But that would be my observation, Laura.

These are all good things. So I wanted to share the rest of the results. Let's see. So I know we just have a minute here. The multiple collaboration platform tools, what's your company's position on, say, standardizing Predominantly everybody says we standardize on our preferred platform and very few say we allow people to keep their legacy. And then have you noticed colleagues feeling more comfortable to speak their mind and challenge M and A assumptions? Most folks are not sure, but there's an even balance between yes and no. I just wanted to wrap up and say thank you for this opportunity. We heard today conversations around the need to develop our leaders, make sure they're prepared to lead. During M and A we talked about the importance of cultural assessments and change management. We talked about the like. Now that we've been in this too for a few months, we've reacted, we need to, we've been reflecting. Now we need to figure out how to rethink the practice and processes going forward. And you know, just folks already have a lot of technology, want to make sure we leverage it to the fullest, get folks to turn their videos on to the level. I mean I wouldn't force it, but to the level that they're comfortable because everybody's in a different situation and so leverage the virtual situation to increase collaboration and communication at your company. Kimberly and dawn, you did such a great job sharing today. I really appreciate your authentic nature and how transparent we are. And I loved working with you on this and Kisan and Maddie, thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you and likewise. It's been a pleasure.

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