Early on in this short and highly readable book the authors describe “the seven deadly sins in implementing transitions in mergers, acquisitions, and gut-wrenching change”.The first is “obsessive list making”. This is a result of over-preparing for the deal and involves a master list of tasks and details that “becomes a mind-numbing, morale-destroying, ego-deflating, knee-buckling litany”.The second is “content-free communications” in which deal announcements consist “primarily of hype and promotion and always produce more questions than answers”. And so on until the seventh – “rewarding the wrong behaviours” – a corporate trait that, of course, is not limited to mergers and acquisitions.You get the idea. Put this way, it would appear that these deals do not fail because they are fundamentally flawed, or because they are the wrong thing at that time for the organisations in question.This is understandable. Both Mr Feldman and Mr Spratt are management consultants and, although they take the odd swipe at the investment bankers who gain most from this sort of corporate activity, there is a fair bit in it for their profession too.Anyway, their thesis is that the real reason why deals fail is that the executives put in charge of them are wanting in exactly this respect: they fail to take charge.Glaxo Wellcome is one of the few results of a merger that is widely reckoned to have been a success, so it is fitting that they quote approvingly from Jeremy Strachan, the company’s legal and corporate affairs director, who has said: “We moved rapidly even at the risk of making some mistakes.

And we don’t seem to have made any more mistakes than if we had taken twice as long.” It makes a powerful case for speed and decision.In fact, so convinced are the pair of the importance of these attributes, not just for deals but all kinds of corporate change, that they and their colleagues at PricewaterhouseCoopers have created a service line, which they have trademarked The Accelerated Transition.The problem with this, though, is that it leads them perilously close to the territory that they attack. “This is not the time to call up the latest management fad,” they insist, before describing what sounds a lot like, if not a fad, then certainly a technique.. TO MANY, e-mail has become the latest torture in the world of work, writes Roger Trapp. For every person who loves dashing off witty memos, there is another who sees the arrival of a message as just another demand on their time. E-mail is, however, a great way of communicating – particularly when so many businesses span time zones. And now suppliers of information are cottoning-on to its power.
Butterworths Tolley, the leading publisher of legal and tax information, has announced that it is to launch Tax Direct, which will supply the latest developments in tax law over the internet and use e-mail to alert users to its arrival.The move comes as another specialist publisher, GEE Publishing, has added an e-mail facility to its electronic information service, the Personnel Manager’s FactFinder.GEE says that developments such as the Employment Relations Bill, based on the White Paper, Fairness at Work, and the arrival of the minimum wage demonstrate the need for employers of all sizes to have access to the latest moves in employment law.Speed is of the essence, as Steve Savory, Butterworth’s internet publisher for tax and accountancy, points out. “With Tax Direct,” he says, “we will e-mail you to tell you that it’s happened, provide the full text of the concession, and link that new concession into the Butterworths Tolley reference works you already use.

This will let you drill down from the news item into the context for that news. In short, we have created the ultimate one-stop tax reference source.”The e-mail service can also be customised, so that, for instance, a tax partner with an international firm can ask to be messaged straight after an announcement, while an accountant working in a much smaller firm can choose to be told once or twice a day.Nor is it just tax specialists who need to keep up to date. As Sally Harper, head of GEE’s human resources department, says, e-mail can help employers across the board avoid the potentially expensive pitfalls created by new legislation.n www.butterworths.co.uk. There is little doubt that training has become an accepted part of business. But it is equally true that companies take a much less scientific approach to it than they should.

Only last week, a study by the trade magazine Training suggested that, while UK organisations spend nearly pounds 10bn a year on it, 37 per cent of them have never evaluated that expenditure in terms of business impact.
Similar findings in the United States have prompted the publication of a recent book, Running Training Like a Business: Delivering Unmistakable Value. In this, David van Adelsberg and Edward Trolley, of the Forum Corporation, demonstrate how training organisations can help companies meet their strategic goals. Essentially, this means running training and development activities in the same way as other business operations so as to maximise opportunities.One London organisation that seems to have an intuitive awareness of this is etc, a training, consulting and venues business that was originally part of Greater London Enterprise. It has recognised that training works best when the conditions are right; and, as a reflection of this, it runs its own premises.Seven years ago, the venues arm of the business was seen as merely a sideline. But as Caroline Bull, who built up the company and is now its chief operating officer, says, things began to change through a stroke of luck. A former accountancy college behind the etc offices, just south of the Thames in London, became vacant and the fledgling company made a deal with its entrepreneur owner to run it in return for a modest rent.The company’s first venue achieved a turnover of pounds 250,000 in its first year. Emboldened by the experience, etc has opened two others, in the City and in the West End.