Rb Insead

Transforming Reckitt Benckiser

04/2011-5686 This case was written by Morten T. Hansen, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning, both at INSEAD, and Nana von Bernuth, Research Associate, with the assistance of Cristina Escallon and Elin Williams. It is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Copyright © 2011 INSEAD

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The Beginning: The 1999 Merger

In 1999, managers from two companies sat together in their Amsterdam offices to hammer out details in the wake of a merger that had created one of the world’s largest producers of home, health and personal care products. The managers, from the German/Dutch company Benckiser and the British Reckitt & Colman, had laboured through a difficult meeting and time was running out. After lunch, a Reckitt manager announced that they needed to wrap things up in order to catch their flight. “There was no decision made, yet all the Reckitt people were happy to leave,” said one Benckiser manager who later told the story. “All the Benckiser people got very, very nervous because they would not leave a meeting without having a clear decision made and clear action agreed. It’s just not possible in our culture.”1 Culture clash is an inevitable byproduct of a large merger, even though from the outside it looked like the perfect marriage. On one side of the aisle was Benckiser, founded in Germany in 1823, which had relocated to the Netherlands and listed on the Amsterdam Stock...