The polite fiction in every M&A integration.

Every M&A integration I've worked on opens with the same slide: "One team, one mission." Within six weeks the slide is quietly retired and the polite fiction begins. Two finance functions. Two sets of forecasting assumptions. Two definitions of "shipped." Everyone pretends not to notice.

The pretence is expensive. It costs more than the synergies the deal was supposed to deliver, because the unacknowledged duplication keeps generating decisions that contradict each other for a year, sometimes two. Nobody wants to be the person who says the integration is failing, so the gap gets papered over with new initiatives that quietly reproduce the old fault lines.

What actually works is naming the fiction on day one. Not in a town hall. In a small room with the operators who will have to live inside the result. You name the place where the two systems disagree, you pick which one wins, and you accept that the other will feel — for a while — like they lost. They did. That's the deal. The honesty earns more goodwill than the fiction ever did.

I've stopped writing 100-day plans that pretend integration is a project. It isn't. It's a year of small, unglamorous reconciliations done by people who'd rather not. The leaders who acknowledge that get a real integration. The ones who don't get a polite fiction with two of everything underneath.