The playwright George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience." Whatever broader truth that observation might hold, it rings false in the world of mergers and acquisitions, where the advantages of experience are both measurable and large.

McKinsey research shows that capital markets are more likely to reward the acquisitions of companies that have long-tenured executives than those made by companies that lack them. In other words, the capital markets, in their collective wisdom, place a premium on deals made by executives with experience in planning, carrying out, and integrating mergers and acquisitions. Not the least important reason is that these seasoned executives bring deep knowledge of their own companies' culture, people, and capabilities—knowledge essential to making healthy, value-creating combinations.

At one level this comes as little surprise: experience is a big advantage in nearly any corporate endeavor. But as David G. Fubini, Colin Price, and Maurizio Zollo argue in "The elusive art of postmerger leadership," M&A experience is especially vital at the very top of an organization. That's because buying and integrating newly acquired companies brings to the fore critical issues that only the most senior executives can handle: creating a new top team, communicating the story behind a merger, and shaping the newly merged companies' performance culture, among other tasks. Being largely intangible, mostly nontechnical, and often unpredictable, these challenges require a degree of experience and the sort of perspective not typically shared by a formal integration team or by managers at lower levels of a company.

Experience may be a good school for acquisitive executives, but the fees are remarkably high. Although historically only around a third of all mergers have created value for the acquirer, things may be a bit better in the current M&A boom. For starters, recent McKinsey research suggests that acquirers and their boards—learning from the mistakes of the past—are showing greater discipline in resisting the temptation to overpay and therefore improving the odds of making value-creating combinations.

With the intention of bettering those odds even further, this edition of The McKinsey Quarterly presents lessons from experienced acquirers at each of the principal stages of M&A: planning, execution, and integration. While the article by Fubini, Price, and Zollo tackles the rigors of post-merger integration, Robert N. Palter and Dev Srinivasan's "Habits of the busiest acquirers" explains how skilled M&A practitioners plan and execute mergers and argues that companies do best by focusing on their strategic goals and choosing acquisitions that complement their own distinctive capabilities.

The final article in this edition's cover section looks at a group of acquirers that are relatively recent arrivals to the world of M&A: Chinese companies. Some have successfully made acquisitions in developing markets, but most are struggling to turn around their sometimes loss-making assets and second-tier brands in Western ones. The hardest tasks for Chinese acquirers include integrating the management of the domestic and acquired businesses and, more broadly, managing the differences between Chinese and Western business cultures and practices. In "Helping Chinese companies master global M&A," Martin Hirt and Gordon Orr suggest some approaches to help bridge the divide.

Finally, this edition of the Quarterly includes Clayton G. Deutsch's interview with Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J. P. Morgan Chase, whose curriculum vitae reflects deep experience with mergers and acquisitions. Dimon's views on their joys and travails are not to be missed by any fellow practitioner of—or anyone interested in—the art and science of M&A.