* Michaela Abao-Viray, Senior Analyst, People Analytics, Equinix
* Aditya Maharaja - Senior Analyst, People Analytics, Equinix

Watch a preview here: https://vimeo.com/tucanaglobal/equinix

Mergers and acquisitions are a popular strategic choice for companies’ growth and expansion. However, it has been reported that more than two-thirds of large merger deals fail to create value for shareholders in the medium term.

Researchers proposed many explanations for such high rate of failures, yet one explanation – often underestimated - is the cultural element in M&A integration processes.

Aditya and Michaela's work aims to better understand the cultural similarities and dissimilarities of two organisations who are about to undergo an M&A process.

Insights gained through performing sentiment analysis and topic modelling on external dataset like Glassdoor reviews, and analysing data collected through internally designed surveys, can be used for making better decisions by the leaders to understand what the pain points of an organisation could be.

Join this advanced session and gain an understanding of the importance of culture in the process of Mergers and Acquisitions, and a way to quantify culture data. Learn ways of working with unstructured data, and utilising it for producing meaningful insights, as well as for designing relevant training programmes for an organisation.

Knowledge required:

- An understanding of basic principles of M&A, Talent Management, and Culture
- Some technical understanding on the topics of web-scraping, R programming, text mining and sentiment analysis

This session will explore:

- Objective of the project and why it's important for the business
- Roadmap of the wider project
- Methodology – web scraping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis
- Results – Thematic grouping of words and topics

Key takeaways:

- Understanding the importance of culture in the process of Mergers and Acquisitions, and a way to quantify culture data
- Ways of working with unstructured data and utilising that for producing meaningful insights