Aug 24 07
Blueprint for a merger
In April of 2007 LSI Corp. merged with Agere Systems and this episode’s guest is Mitch Seigle, LSI’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing. The merger brought together two proud and successful organizations and we were lucky to speak with Mitch about his experience during this challenging transition. (Total Running Time 16:39)
Full transcript after the jump.
Renn Vara: On this edition of More Than Talk, we talk with Mitch Seigle, Vice-President of Corporate Marketing at LSI. Early this year LSI and Agere, two great technology companies, successfully merged into one with more than 9,000 employees.
Now as the vice-president, and I assume in that job your audiences are more than the internal employees, give me a sense and give the audience a sense of how wide this job is and what it encompasses.
Mitch Seigle: Well, for me, I’m really responsible for all aspects of our corporate marketing mix and of course that includes the employee communications piece, but also all of our public relations, our community relations, corporate philanthropy. We are responsible for all of our product-level communications — all of the news and information that flows around our products and the content of our web site. So, within my role, I’m responsible for providing that global message to all of our constituencies whether they’re customers, employees, or investors.
Renn Vara: Mitch, as I understand it LSI has been going through quite a merger here with Agere. Can you tell me what you guys have been doing and how you’ve been dealing with it?
Mitch Seigle: Well Renn, as you mentioned, LSI Corp. basically has merged with Agere Systems in April of 2007. LSI and Agere are both companies of roughly equal sizes. So as you might imagine, we have a tremendous amount of integration activity, a tremendous communications challenge in front of us to unify all of our employees and energize and motivate those employees to help us complete these activities quickly and efficiently for the benefit of our customers and our investors and of course, for our employees.
Renn Vara: What has been your strategy to make this happen as smoothly as possible?
Mitch Seigle: One of the key things that we really looked at, and we have the big fortune I suppose of having a few months of advance planning activities prior to the closing of the merger as we were both public companies in the regulatory period, a lot of time for significant planning. During that period, what we quickly did was to engage people on both sides of the merger to really understand the corporate cultures on both sides, to understand what worked, what didn’t work, any of the challenges of the past on both sides, and to essentially come up with a strategy for communications that would appeal to all of the employees on the very first day which we actually code named Day 1. The Day 1 activities were a well laid out plan that took several months and tremendous numbers of people to really plan and execute. We used a wide variety tools to really bring the message home to those employees on the very first day of the completion.
Renn Vara: Before we get into the tools that you mentioned, tell us what were the general large cultural differences that existed between LSI and Agere that you felt that you had to go after.
Mitch Seigle: Well, both companies shared many similarities but there are some important differences. I think it’s important not only to recognize the differences but also find that common ground. The common ground between the companies was really based on long heritages of significant technical innovation, and then some of the important differences though is that the LSI culture was largely a West Coast based culture here in the Silicon Valley and the Agere culture is rigged strongly in the East Coast of the United States — so significant differences in terms of style of communications and corporate background and culture.
But we found, to a large degree, that with many many areas of common understanding and in the early going, it was very gratifying when we would come away from meetings and people would say, “Wow! I really liked those guys.” — that doesn’t happen in every merger so I guess we were very fortunate to find a lot of common ground with our new colleagues.
Renn Vara: That’s great. How much of that, when you say you’re luckier that you found common ground, when you put the luck aside, would you credit toward the fact that you had a plan, that you had months in advance to work on it. Give our audience some sense of what that takes to bring yourself together to have that kind of luck happen.
Mitch Seigle: Well, that’s a good point. Certainly, luck is no accident in this particular case. It required tremendous amounts of bandwidth on the part of many people on both sides. When I say ‘many people’, I’m really talking about dozens to hundreds of people in all areas of the company working as a team. One of the key things we did though early on was to gather expectations.
And so we pulled all of the people that were involved in this merger integration planning to find out what their expectations would be if they were to give a perfect grade to this Day 1 experience, what that would really look like. From that, we were able to come up with a list of requirements and quite frankly, an opportunity to swing for the census and really exceed those expectations.
So, we really laid out a plan that would go beyond those expectations. But the key hallmark on Day 1 was for with every employee, no matter where they were around the world, would have the opportunity to personally feel as if they were a part of this new company coming together and experience it along with all of their colleagues on a global basis.
Renn Vara: That’s great. One of the things we forget about it that when you do a merger like this, it’s not just a West Coast-East Coast problem, it’s a worldwide problem. When I say problem, a challenge.
Mitch Seigle: Well, absolutely. It was a challenge especially for us because not only were both of the companies multinational to begin with, we of course had substantial populations of employees in Asia. So, the numbers of employees in Asia were almost equivalent to all of the employees from the U.S. and Europe combined. And so as you imagine with all of the time zones, the ability to have everyone participate live in real time during a single business day is very logistically complex.
So, we took advantage of something special, well of course I think is available to many public companies, and that’s really the relationship that we have with our stock exchange. In our case, that’s the New York Stock Exchange and we took advantage of their facilities for communication and made the experience very real by ringing the closing bell on that day and bringing that live via satellite feeds to all of our employees in real time in the U.S. and Europe.
And then later that evening, live from New York about 11:00 pm in the evening, reached our employees in Asia live the next morning. And so we made the experience personalized for everyone with live participation from the executives reaching everyone within a single business day.
Renn Vara: Let’s talk about tools a little bit then because you mentioned that’s basically one tool right there. What tools did you use — communication tools — to make this happen? How did you reach out to all these people? And the then second part to that, Mitch, is in doing that was the feedback mechanism meaning hearing from these people — was that an important component of this whole communication effort?
Mitch Seigle: Well, absolutely. This was certainly not a one way communication effort. Our goal was to make sure that everyone could not only witness the activities and the historic moment in which the merger was closed but to actually participate and contribute. Some of the interesting tools that we used that were very successful and we got great feedback from employees on a global basis — one was the idea of creating a video that was a combination of individual videos that were filmed by employee groups on a voluntary basis around the world.
And so we had literally dozens of short video clips provided by employees, when employees would get together and film their own unique welcome to their colleagues around the world, giving insight not only into physically what their locations looked like but some of the things that they were proud of and what their culture was like and quite frankly, some very humorous and touching short videos.
We edited that down, and it really was a great tool to bring the emotion of the day forward and make that visible to all employees. So it was warm and touching and funny, and it was a very appropriate communications tool to bring the culture together rapidly.
Renn Vara: Mitch, let me jump in real quick on that. In the sense of coming up with this idea, was it kind of taking the ‘YouTubizing’ of video and applying that idea — was that where that came from?
Mitch Seigle: Well, I think that you certainly can’t deny the exact phenomenon like a YouTube on culture but we didn’t use YouTube itself to do that but yes, it very much was like that. We used digital video cameras and people willingly submitted things that they had filmed with their cell phones.
So it was very casual, very easy, to bring that together. We did a little bit of professional editing to make this more viewable for the audience. But yes, we did deliver this through the web, made it available to people and so very much a sort of internal YouTube-like experience for people.
Renn Vara: Mitch, as you describe this, I can’t imagine a bigger job. You have the normal job of just doing what you do with LSI but then basically what you did here is you helped create a whole new company. Because even though the two companies existed, when you put them together and have to rebrand and build all of that, ostensibly you’re starting a company from the ground up.
Mitch Seigle: It’s an interesting observation, Renn. You could, in some ways, look at us as a well-established, 25 plus-year-old startup. In some ways, we’re new; we’re building this new experience together yet we have the benefit of years and years of experience and a legacy of innovation that we can leverage highly.
But mergers, while they are very challenging in and of themselves with all the integration and planning activities that go on, what’s actually occurred here despite the extra work of rebranding is it’s actually made it easier because we’ve been able to rally people and blend cultures together more easily around what we collectively want our new company and our new brand to be about rather than adapting to either of the previous brands.
Renn Vara: As you well know, being a professional in this, this idea of ‘brand’ can be a tough thing to even explain to people that supposedly know how to do it much less having to explain it to employees, to investors, to the wider community. So I congratulate you on doing something pretty extraordinary.
Mitch Seigle: Well, thank you very much.
Renn Vara: So, let’s talk real quick then about this new world that we’re all stepping into and how this is impacting the jobs of communicators like you. We talk about things like social networking; we talk about this 24/7 world where our are emails dominating our lives and it’s now mobile and nobody can hide, we’re reachable everywhere — there’s a good and bad to that particularly from a communicating standpoint. You can now communicate to everybody around the world, really 24/7, and a number of ways to do it.
The negative is all of the same things — it’s 24/7 and there are some number of ways of doing it. How are you and your organization dealing with this kind of new multileveled, go-back-and-forth conversation that is now happening with all the audiences all the time? Do you feel that or am I overstating it from your position?
Mitch Seigle: I don’t know that you’re overstating the challenges of the 24/7 or an always-on type of an environment. Certainly the opportunity to communicate all of the time is overwhelming in terms of the resources if you were to choose to communicate all the time. I think part of this is to have the discipline to determine when and where you should communicate. And because you have so many more opportunities to choose from, it makes it a complex mix.
What we’ve done is we’ve literally decentralized a lot of that communication so that we’re much closer to the point of communication. So for our communications throughout the Asia Pacific region, those communications largely originate in Asia with the teams there who understand the messages — what the local markets need, and the customs and culture are taken into consideration. And so we tailor that message and the delivery vehicles that we use to closely meet the geographies and the target markets that we’re communicating to.
So, in this case, I think choosing wisely from among all the opportunities is the way to actually make sense of this, and not feel compelled to grab every new technology simply because it’s available but to look for ones that are best suited with the mission in a particular area of the business or area of the world that you need to target.
Renn Vara: Are you embracing in using blogs and social networking and that kind of thing within LSI?
Mitch Seigle: Yes, we are. Now I’d like to tell you that it’s been tremendously successful and that we’re fully taking advantage of all of these tools. I think it’s a work in progress for us. We did start an executive blog a couple of years back and that’s been fairly successful in that it’s created an informal conversation between our chief executive and our employee base. It allows for a much more personal experience.
And so we think it’s been great in terms of people getting to know our CEO on a more personal level but there are challenges of course in keeping those things current with the schedule of a busy executive.
We’ve also used an open Q&A mechanism. So we’re using the power of our Intranet to allow employees to submit questions to executives that are running various areas of the business and to get a response to those questions. And we provide for employees anonymity if they so choose so that they’ll feel comfortable in bringing those things up to the attention of management.
And so we’re creating a really open communications culture. And that’s really been the beneficial side effect of all of these tools. The ‘ gee-whiz factor’ is less important than the effectiveness of the communications that results from it.
Renn Vara: That’s terrific. Mitch, we got two more rules, short areas, I want to touch on. You’ve been great; I mean I appreciate your time on this. The first one is the idea of where you see this going. In this kind of blog area, the area that we’re in and this kind my face kind of intruding on corporations — do you have an end game here? Do you see maybe in the future, three to five years from now, on how we’re going to be communicating with our employees?
Mitch Seigle: Well, I think that all of these tools — while there are tremendous new tools coming into the market, and each of them has a certain gestation period if you will in which it takes for them to catch on where they’re going to go through a cycle of hype in the beginning and then sort of people understanding what you can really do with them that is effective versus things that you can do with them that are just not as effective or useless — I think everything takes a while to mature.
Where it is all going is that, in this 24/7 type of communications environment, that we’ll have many many tools to take advantage of we’ll still need to apply our discipline but essentially it will break down the barriers of communication and allow corporate cultures to emerge that are more fully virtualized. And that makes it efficient where employees can work where and when they need to in the most effective manners. And I think that provides tremendous value with in terms of employees being empowered as well efficiencies and economies.
Renn Vara: And finally Mitch, what advice would you give other communicators like yourself as they face this world that you’re describing?
Mitch Seigle: If I were to offer one piece of advice given all the tools that are available is to not lose sight of the human element. Technology is great but it’s a means to an end; it’s not the end in and of itself. And I think that we can’t overlook the need to bring emotion to what we do, to motivate people to build pride. And that provides tremendous benefits to an organization — to have their employees feel good about what they do, feel good about the company and the contributions that the company makes not only to customers, investors and employees but to their community as well.
And so using these tools to create a way for people to connect with each other emotionally in the workplace and build that sense of camaraderie and pride is really the benefit that we get from these tools. Not losing sight of that would be the most important lesson I think that we really capitalized on in all of our Day 1 planning activities and hope to continue to capitalize on in the future.
Renn Vara: Well, Mitch, thank you for your time today. Again, congratulations for pulling off a nice, smooth merger at least seen from the outside with LSI and Agere. Thank you very much.
Mitch Seigle: Thank you very much, Renn.
Renn Vara: That was Mitch Seigle, Vice-President of Communications for LSI in Milpitas, California.
