The acquirer just adopted an alien culture

When you acquire a startup, there are a million integration tasks that you need to attack. One of the more complex (risky) items is around company culture! The acquirer just adopted an alien culture, which upon integration is most often turned into a polite ask of the acquired employees to shed themselves from prior habits. It is most often the correct ask but still a very delicate request, to say the least.

Why am I saying the obvious? I did a talk to a group of founders the other day on the Startup Exit / PMI process and found the perfect picture to illustrate this particular challenge and I had to share it :-)