Forging a Unified Executive Team at a Global Technology Company
After a cross-border acquisition left two executive teams coexisting but not collaborating, a two-day Samurai Game® experience broke through polite avoidance and produced the first real working agreements between the groups.
Global Technology Company
2 days
Full-immersion program
18
Executives aligned
5
New working agreements adopted
72%
Reduction in post-meeting rework
The Challenge
Eighteen months after acquiring a European competitor, a global technology company still had two executive teams rather than one. Meetings were polite, agendas were followed, and decisions were technically made — but anyone in the room could feel the guardedness. The acquired leaders suspected their expertise was being discounted; the acquiring leaders felt they were walking on eggshells. Product roadmaps collided quarterly. Strategic bets got hedged into incoherence.
The CEO had tried the usual remedies: offsites, team-building workshops, revised operating cadences. Each bought a few weeks of improvement, then the old patterns returned. What was missing was not information or structure. It was the willingness to be direct with each other under pressure.
Our Approach
We proposed the Samurai Game® — a full-immersion, two-day experiential learning program that puts leaders in simulated high-stakes scenarios designed to surface exactly the patterns that were stalling this team. The CEO was initially skeptical. Their team ran on analytical rigor, not metaphor. We agreed the work needed to earn its place, and framed every debrief around the specific strategic decisions the executive team was stuck on.
Across two days, the combined leadership team moved through scenarios that rewarded courage, deep listening, and integrity under pressure. Coaches debriefed each scenario on the spot, helping leaders notice the exact moments they had withheld a dissenting view, softened a critique, or chosen politeness over partnership. The conversations that followed were the kind the team had been avoiding for eighteen months.
The Transformation
The team left with five concrete working agreements they drafted themselves in the final debrief — the first genuine agreements between the two halves of the executive team. Over the next quarter, product roadmap conflicts that had lingered for a year were resolved in a single joint planning session. The CEO later described the two days as the moment the acquisition actually completed.
Six months after the program, a follow-up assessment showed sustained changes in how the team disagreed: faster surfacing of tension, more direct language, and notably fewer decisions that quietly unraveled after meetings ended.
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