Considering and enlisting stakeholders becomes important to achieve success for any acquisition. Acquisitions are generally assumed to be objective, or focused on the numbers. Consistent with this perspective, synergy is the most common justification for acquisition activity. Achieving synergy involves integrating firms to produce a combined performance greater than what was achieved independently. An implicit challenge then is to coordinate the efforts of groups with different interests to realize expected gains. This means that acquisitions quickly go from numbers to considering the impacts on people, as achieving synergy requires clear communication of the implications of an acquisition to the impacted groups. 2012