The Second Integration

Integration doesn't fail in the boardroom. It fails in the break room. One integration lives in steering committees and milestone reviews. The other lives in break rooms, in what a middle manager tells their team when leadership isn't in the room. That manager decides which integration wins.

I’m David Treybig. I've spent my career in the space between the deal room and the floor. Not on one side of the integration or the other, but in the seam where the synergy thesis meets the operations manager who's never heard of it.

Most recently, I was Executive Vice President of Operations and Chief Information Officer at Tenerity, a PE-backed loyalty and identity-protection company. There, I led the two-year carve-out that separated us from JPMorgan Chase after we divested our travel business (powering the Sapphire Rewards travel ecosystem). Full deal-value protection, on time, on budget, zero material compliance incidents. Twenty years now, ten M&A transactions, companies from $350 million to $20 billion. The deal model is usually right about the numbers and wrong about the people.

I'm writing and thinking about this every week. If you want to keep up with it, find me on LinkedIn — that's where I'm sharing this content these days. I'd love to stay connected there.