India's Role in Global Mergers & Acquisitions

The McKinsey Quarterly has an interview with Koushik Chatterjee about Tata Steel's approach to mergers and acquistions. This is Chatterjee describing Tata's approach to M&A:

If you look at the literature about how to acquire and integrate a company, it typically says that you put in your own people, who understand your objectives, and have them drive the new company, aligning the acquired company’s people, processes, and systems with those of the acquirer. We haven’t been doing that with the conventional rigidity of an acquirer. From a mind-set perspective, we quite genuinely tend to look at an acquisition as a partnership rather than an acquisition. If a company is listed in the public markets, in form it will obviously be an acquisition, but in substance it could be a very good partnership if we align the objectives across the organizations. We don’t send planeloads of people into a new company. Instead, we only send in a few integrators. That’s been the key interface.

Interesting and sobering stuff.  The full interview is here (registration required).
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