We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. – The Borg, Star Trek: First Contact

Employees of the former State Street Research and Merrill Lynch Investment Management organizations probably feared as much when they first heard their firms were to be acquired by BlackRock (in 2004 and 2006, respectively), a place known for its tightly run institutional bond management and no-nonsense CEO, Larry Fink. In fact, that seems to be almost exactly what they got. To hear members of the team tell it--over and over again--the model of "One BlackRock" is no joke.

If those folks are to be believed, though, the next crew destined for assimilation from Barclays Global Investors should keep their heads up (and not just because many stand to be enriched by selling their 11% stake in BGI as part of the deal). So-called "legacy MLIM" employees marvel at just how efficient, functional, and communicative the organization is relative to what they had grown used to in their prior work lives. Dik Blewitt came to BlackRock along with early-2009 acquisition R3, but he's been in the industry for more than 20 years and says BlackRock is "the smallest huge place I've worked in my entire life."

Dennis Stattman and his team seem to agree. They run BlackRock Global Allocation (MDLOX), and in hindsight it seems almost miraculous that they stuck around MLIM as long as they did. Under Merrill Lynch and tucked away in its junior-college style office park outside of Princeton, the group was like an arctic outpost relative to Mother Merrill's otherwise mammoth, New York-based brokerage. Stattman's group is visibly thrilled to now be part of a dedicated asset-management firm that, instead of ignoring it, first asked what resources the group needed to better do its job.

A Massive Game of Speed Chess
There are two messages here, each critical in its own right. One is that BlackRock appears to have done an incredible job of integrating its past acquisitions, whether or not all of the positive talk we've heard is sincere. Successful asset-management mergers are extremely few and far between, and it's difficult to think of any that have avoided managerial disasters or wholesale departures as completely as BlackRock has. State Street Research and MLIM were absorbed so swiftly and efficiently that scant room was left to allow for trouble to percolate.

That was no forgone conclusion either, as some of the worst cautionary examples were cases in which Merrill bungled its own asset-manager acquisitions.