Insights
What Diligence Misses When the Team Can't Name How the Business Works
Andrew Matney is a finance, strategy, and M&A operator who has seen transactions from nearly every angle — lender, advisor, investor, and operator. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, he shares what gets missed when everyone is on their best behavior before the close, and why the real operating system of a founder-led business lives in decisions, not documents. If you're navigating a post-close integration or thinking about how to prep a company for acquisition, this conversation will change what you look for.
Resistance Is Data
Kamran Jahanshahi is the President and Founder of Peak Point Consulting, with 25 years of transformation leadership across Citibank, MetLife, and Walgreens Boots Alliance. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, Kamran breaks down what separates integrations that survive from ones that quietly fail, and why most organizations underinvest in the one part that determines the outcome: people. If you are leading a company through an acquisition or advising one that is, this conversation will sharpen how you think about operating models, leadership credibility, and why the resistance you are seeing is not a threat but a signal.
Why Your AI Pilots Keep Stalling and What to Build Instead
Louie Celiberti of E27 Technology Solutions explains why AI pilots fail and how an architecture-first approach builds lasting enterprise capability.
The Honeymoon Tax
Around 90 days into any big change, the energy goes quiet. The dashboard stays green. The strategy holds. But the thing that was moving is suddenly not. Here is the math behind why
How to Write Team Working Agreements That Don't Become Posters
You know the arc. Someone schedules the session, sticky notes go up, the agreements get posted on a wiki page. Three months later somebody breaks one and the room kind of looks around. Most working agreements get written one of two ways, and both ways break. There is a third structure that holds up, and most teams have never tried it.
Your Team Is Doing Math In Every Meeting
Your team runs a quiet formula before speaking up in any high-stakes meeting. The math is rational, the silence is not weakness, and somewhere in that formula is a variable for you. Here is what they are calculating, and how to change the answer.
Herding Squirrels Ep 23
Stephen Szypulski leads post-acquisition integration at Fitch Learning, part of Fitch Group and Hearst Corporation, where the business serves more than 100,000 learners across over 100 countries. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, he walks through why so many M&A deals lose value after close, what actually breaks first when an integration plan meets reality, and why the work of integration is fundamentally about shepherding velocity without pushing the organization into shock. If you are leading change, integrating teams after an acquisition, or running an AI rollout that is starting to look like a merger, this conversation will give you a clearer way to think about people, culture, and the parts of the deal that never show up in the model.
Why Your Team Doesn't Work Like You
You like deep focus, so the team must want quiet hours. You think on your feet, so the team must love brainstorms. You keep going until it's done, so the team must respect the grind. Except they don't. Here's how to stop projecting your operating system onto your team and build the foundation an unstoppable team actually needs.
Stop Building an AI Strategy
You've read 47 AI posts this week. There's a reason. Festinger named it in 1954, and it's quietly running every AI rollout happening right now. When people are uncertain, they look at each other before they look at the tool. The leaders who get adoption right aren't the ones with the best strategy. They're the ones building the room where honest reactions can surface. Here's what that looks like.
Your Teams Don't Have a Personality Problem
Every organization has the same fight. Sales thinks engineering is inflexible. Engineering thinks sales is reckless. Product thinks everyone is slow. But the personality labels are a symptom, not the cause. The real problem is that no one ever named the shared goal that makes all their individual goals matter.
Your Team Isn’t Disengaged
Your team looks aligned in the meeting. But the real conversation is happening somewhere else. Here are the three layers of silence and how to bring teams back.
Why Your Team Navigates Change Alone
Your team is already comparing themselves to each other during change. They're just doing it silently, with bad data. Here's what happens when you make it visible.