A simple plan for success: "Build, Buy or Sell" is the slogan of ACG Denver's 6th Annual Rocky Mountain Corporate Growth Conference, and that about sums it up. In corporate life, what more is there?

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Association for Corporate Growth - Conference news

A business either grows through reinvestment of its own surpluses or other types of internal infusions, or it buys another entity, or it sells part or all of itself.

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After that explanation it gets considerably more complicated. But to hear the corporate chieftains and commentators who plan to contribute their wisdom to the conference, the key is "keep it simple."

And you know the rest of that saying.

To the CEO, keeping it simple means keeping one's eye on the ball whether your company is buying, selling, growing organically, or doing some or all of all three.

Chief executive officers, chief financial officers and other corporate leaders need to keep their mergers and acquisitions muscles pumped up.

"You are always in a mergers and acquisitions mode," says Aaron Todd, chief executive officer of Denver-based Air Methods Corp. and conference co-chairman.

And that means keeping everybody's eyeballs on the corporate culture, whatever yours might be, and whatever changes the business weathers when it is building, buying, selling or preparing for its sale.

Culture. To hear the CEOs and the experts tell it, consistent, constant, definable, actionable (not in the sense of litigation) and repeat-able corporate culture is the hallmark, the glue, of a growing business with leadership that seeks to fulfill its potential.

Branding expert Joe Calloway, a conference keynote speaker, brings up the $36 billion combination of Sprint and Nextel, both past clients of his. The merger complete, today "they are working on that consistency of message and constancy of message," he says.

The most common thread among companies that have strong cultures is leadership that bangs that drum day and night.

"When he was at GE, Jack Welch said, 'There are days when I talk of the company's mission and who we are so much that I get sick of hearing myself,' but he kept doing it because his view was, 'Hey, I'm the leader of the company. That is my job, above anything else, to remind everybody of who we are and what we're about.'

"The examples go on and on and on and on about the consistency of message and constancy of message," Calloway says.

Corporate culture. Take the example of an acquisition of a near-equal. This recently was the case when Denver-based Air Methods Corp., the world's largest air medical transportation company, grew by 40 percent by acquiring Pittsburgh-based CJ Systems Aviation Group Inc.

"When you are bringing two organizations of equal size together, culture is the No. 1 challenge," Todd says.

On the buyer's side, "culture will develop and evolve...