T

he world’s worst-kept business secret is that most acquisitions fail. Depending on what metric you use to evaluate success, mergers miss their intended goals by as much as 85 percent of the time. With a failure rate that high, there’s no single cause, and there’s no silver bullet that will guarantee successful post-merger integration. When you read the postmortems on failed business combinations, it’s clear that the role of process management is too often overlooked as a strategy to reduce risk.

What could possibly go wrong when you ignore process tenets? Everything.

Case in point. Last week, I had dinner with an old friend who was exhausted after working all day—on his day off. Ever since his company was acquired, he spends his day putting out fires and consoling his demoralized colleagues. His business, a once-profitable midsized manufacturing company, is now a place where people cry—almost every day.

 …