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Last week, Carol Hymowitz had an insightful column in the Wall Street Journal titled "In Deal-Making, Keep People in Mind." Here's an excerpt.

"Corporate deal-making, as we've seen recently, is a lot like dating and marriage. Success forging a partnership has as much to do with propitious timing and mutual attraction as it does with adroit negotiating -- and it's often difficult to predict the outcome."

Actually, it's worse than dating and marriage. According to some studies, 70 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail to produce increased value for shareholders. But this is not an economic problem.

We've decided that strategy is the great driver of business success. So when it comes to mergers we believe that if we can get the strategy right we can make those pesky human beings do what they should.

The tragedy is that we've got it backwards and thousands of workers and shareholders are going to keep suffering from misguided merger attempts until we get things right. The truth is that culture trumps strategy every time. And the only way to make the strategy work is to make sure that the people parts fit.

Some years back, Chevron was my client. Chevron had acquired Gulf Oil in the mid-1980s. The news releases called it a "merger of equals" but everyone involved knew better.

People at Chevron felt like their company had acquired Gulf. People at Gulf felt like they'd become part of a very different kind of company.

I noticed that former Gulf workers sat together at trainings and in meetings. They defiantly wore Gulf belt buckles and jackets. Then there were the paintings.

I'd seen the painting in some offices and I thought it was a sun setting behind an oil rig at sea. One day I noticed that what I had thought was the sun wasn't the sun at all. It was the old, orange Gulf Oil logo. And the rig wasn't just a rig. It carried the name of Chevron.

It reminded me of the Jacobites. That movement arose to support restoration of the Stuart kings to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. After James II was deposed, the Stuarts lived in Europe.

Jacobites were often expected to offer the Loyal Toast to the King or Queen of England. It was common for them to hold their glass above a glass of water, to toast "the King over the water."

In the same spirit, the Gulf paintings and jackets and belt buckles sent their message of protest against the merger. You can argue that the merger worked despite the protest, but I wonder how much productivity was lost. Just like I wonder about HP's acquisition of EDS.

It may work if HP is smart enough to leave the EDS shock troops alone and provide resources to make them more effective. But if HP really tries to being EDS into the fold, you can expect resistance. Sorting out cultural resistance is a long, tedious and emotional process. It never works in favor of increased cooperation and productivity.

My guess is that the acquisition won't work. EDS is a couple of thousand miles away from HP. It's in Plano, Texas, not Silicon Valley. And it's got a buttoned-down, tie-wearing, almost military culture, not the vaunted Silicon Valley culture of individual expression.

I wonder if the people at EDS have any jackets, belt buckles, or paintings.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.