Isolde is the head of Siiquent, making money on the consumable supplements to equipment in hospitals and diagnostic labs for gene-based diagnosis. Siiquent sells its goods at just the right price to help hospitals make money and offers free services to its customers. Emanuel, on the other hand, is the head of Teomik, making money on the equipment itself for use in research labs and universities for gene-based studies. Big funders of genetic research are willing to pay large amounts of money to help scientists conduct genomics studies and aim for prestige in scientific journals. Teomik also offers comprehensive services to its customers.
From this case study of their merge, I have found that the pros of “imposing the structure of a single revenue model” as opposed to “letting [the company] continue on its flexible way” is greater certainty and a fixed plan for unexpected situations. The company would be better able to select customers and deal with the competitive landscape. Yet, a peril of this is its rigidity. The company would be much more hesitant to try new things that are not certain to work or that are too far from the way they currently operate. In a quickly changing environment, flexibility might prove more successful at times.
In the pretend situation in which the CEO has decided that the department heads must merge their divisions together (and I will be interpreting this as two arbitrary department heads rather than Isolde and Emanuel specifically), as a PM assigned to mediate this interaction between department heads, I would have the department heads meet and explain their understandings of the ways in which their companies operate to me and each other. We would together find aspects of their companies that overlap and would work well together as well as aspects that clash, then start working out how one might mesh into the other. If they absolutely cannot form one revenue model for the merge, it might be worth considering keeping them both and just adjusting them so that they interfere with each other as little as possible. For this, we may need to talk to more people in the companies who would be able to provide more insight into how they work together, but I don’t think it would be impossible for the merger to have two revenue models and be successful.
