Well, I guess you learn something new every day.  

A super critical requirement is a headquarters SPOC (Single Point of Contact) for any decision concerning the remote location - for any decision that comes out of HQ that is not day-to-day business as usual. Someone who cares about the over health and well-being of the lab, even for things that don’t directly effect them, or their department. This is especially true if the remote location consists of a conglomeration of smallish groups reporting to different HQ functions. Otherwise, the different HQ departments will try to optimize things for their own group - but these local optimizations can a have a huge impact on the overall health of the lab - which won’t be noticed until it is too late (unless their is a SPOC).

For example, two HQ departments  could decide to streamline their organizations and remove some positions - for example each decides to remove one person in the remote location.  Even though each decision on its own makes sense - taken together it could have a very negative effect on the remote location - lowering moral and motivation. Cleaning up the fallout could take months….

So make sure you have a SPOC. Live long and prosper!

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:33 am and is filed under Aquisition, Integration, M&A, VC, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.