This two part case series provides an inside view on how the former Daimler-Benz and Chrysler Corporations organized their integration efforts following their May 1998 merger, the first truly transatlantic merger in history and, at the time, the largest ever. As such, this merger presents an unusually broad array of management issues that were both unprecedented in scope and rather unique, ranging from cross-cultural management and global strategy and implementation, to international M&A alliances and change management. The case is divided into two complementary parts, which can used together or separately, as stand-alone cases, depending on the instructor’s objectives. The first part, IMD-3-0773, describes a journey that started during the early 1980s, until the events that preceded the Daimler-Chrysler merger, outlining the key strategic, organizational and execution challenges which both companies faced as they moved to actually integrate the largest industrial merger the world had seen to date. The second part, IMD-3-0774, describes how DaimlerChrysler actually organized and moved to implement the post-merger integration process, raising a set of issues around structural risks, cultural aspects, and execution skills in a high-stakes, global context of a major post-merger integration effort.
