TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

Asking a single executive, even the CEO, to distill all of the information that goes into doing a deal is misguided. 

It’s too hard, and too limiting. 

There’s an old saying that goes, “You don’t see with your eyes, you see things through your eyes.” That’s to say, we tend to pay most attention to the things that we understand, and the things that resonate with us. Similarly, any single executive is likely to gravitate towards the part of the information pile that’s easiest for them to interpret. The CTO leans into the tech diligence findings. The CFO remembers the financials. The CHRO memorizes the organizational chart. This dynamic can work for or against you: By farming out communications duties to one executive, you can expect a slightly biased narrative that often misses details that might be critical for other teams. But by leveraging multiple sets of eyes and ears, you can create a powerful, crowdsourced machine that picks out the most important bits of the story. 

Sure, that second way – the more inclusive way - sounds better… but how do you do that without all crowding around a single Microsoft word document?

We do it in a workshop, and the agenda always looks the same:

  1. Tell the story from multiple angles
  2. Ask the team to capture the most important parts
  3. Discuss, synthesize, and simplify as needed

Here’s how it looks in practice. In a recent add-on acquisition deal, we built in time with both our portfolio company leadership team and the company they were acquiring to hold a joint storytelling session. To start, we asked several attendees to briefly prepare two sides of the merger’s story.

One side, “The Deal Thesis” (told by our CEO) summarized the longer-term vision for the company and how the acquisition (a bolt-on that expanded our ability to serve our customer’s needs) filled an important strategic gap for the company. The other side was delivered by the acquiree’s CEO. Starting with the founding of the company, he shared “the founder’s story”, including what he believed his team was great at and what had gotten him excited about the merger during the deal process.

While the two CEOs were talking, we armed the rest of the leadership team with a special note-taking page that helped them capture the most important and clarifying parts of the story - the parts we would eventually share with the rest of the organization. These were: