Halma: 1998-2005 Case Study

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Which is like sustainability? It's kind of like some kind of minimum profit target they're looking at, really?

Yes. And if you put in a budget, culturally, if you showed you were going backwards, you were in for a pretty significant investigation. You could get away with it if you could articulate what's going on and, more importantly, what's my plan to make it better. You had to have a plan. So, at Halma, the focus was very much on the quality of forecasting and the quality of the MDs and subsidiary boards to know what the plan is, either what the ambition is to grow faster or what the plan is to fix a problem when they inevitably come up.

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But do you think it makes sense to merge them, then? I mean, because you kind of lose the whole decentralized approach.

It's a slippery slope. The companies that tend to underperform take a good period of time to resolve their issues after merging. This process can obscure some mistakes because the chaos of the merger is anticipated. If other areas are performing well, these issues might not be as visible. They often assign one of the MDs to take charge of these newly merged businesses. For instance, Texecom absorbed a company called Klaxon. Klaxon was well-known but was losing money and not growing. I worked for the same chairman who one day decided to integrate Klaxon into another one of our businesses. This approach has been typical in their other consolidations.

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