Publicis Groupe Essay

1.What lessons did Maurice Levy learned from the failed FCB alliance? According to Maurice Levy, the more or less heavy thing he learnt from the failure of the alliance with FCB is the necessity to build an alliance not just based on a good relationship between the managers but also on a strong legal structure. In fact, the relationship Maurice created with FCBs managers was mostly informal. Maurice and FCBs CEO met only quintet times and the alliance was more a collaborative arrangement than a real harmony. The author describes it as an alliance which intended to be more than just a handshake but without any promise on the structure of the deal, the alliance seems mostly to rely on the managers relationship. On the contrary, in the adjacent exercise of acquisitions, Levy not only met the managers several times, he had also special meetings with the CFOs where they try to reach an agreement about the structure of the deal and the structure of the company after the acquisition . For example, for Saatchi & Saatchi acquisition, Maurice worked out the exposit of the acquisition with the CFO Bill Codhrat and they discuss all the legal points to undertake to face the future events which could imprint both companies after the acquisition. They spent two weeks working on the structure of the deal, settling every inside information before calling lawyers. After the failed FCB alliance, the lawyers became indispensable in the process of acquisition. The second lesson he learnt from this failed alliance is how important are the interest that people have in the acquisition. An alliance consists in two companies becoming 1 and the managers of the two firms have to realize this fundamental point.After the acquisition, they need to have the interest of both companies in mind to create a successful firm. In order to put aside managers egos in next acquisitions, Maurice Levy first spent a lot of time creating a strong relationship with the firms CEOs, exhausting to u nderstand who they were, what they wanted and how they could combine the interest of the two companies. For example, in Saatchi and Saatchis process of acquisition, both CEOs agree on the fact that they had to keep the two operations very separate in order to defend their own client. That is to say, they tried not only to build a strong relationship based on trust but also to settle a framework in order to protect the chance on interest of the two companies after the acquisition.