A thin line divides the kind of merger that nurtures a company's growth from one that destroys value. No surprise, then, that M&A practitioners go to great lengths to tilt the odds in their favor. They hire world-class M&A teams, modify the organizational design of their companies, or add systems, tools, and processes to smooth integration and to accelerate the capture of synergies. Yet a merger's performance over time is subject to so many variables that it's difficult to analyze whether such moves really work.

To unearth the practical insights that can help companies succeed in planning and executing acquisitions, we went directly to the executives most responsible for overseeing M&A at the top US acquirers.¹ Over the course of 20 interviews with business-development officers, we explored their thinking on what does and doesn't work in M&A. Then, to see what companies rewarded by the capital markets were doing differently, we compared the different approaches of these companies with their general performance during an active period of acquisitions.

Our findings provide a road map for the way companies should think about and execute acquisitions to improve their odds of success. We found, for example, that development officers at most...