You have found the CEO, Joan, of Venus Widgets impatiently waiting outside of your door wanting to talk to you. You quickly finish up your latest meeting and invite the CEO into your office. Joan is talking a mile a minute, and you must do your best to calm her down. After taking a deep breath, the CEO tells you that they have decided that the time is right for greater expansion, not only on a national level but internationally as well. She wants to expand Venus Widgets across the globe and needs your help with making the decision.

The CEO has tasked you with researching and presenting information that she can use to help make this important decision. You will write a paper covering the following areas:

• Discuss the benefits and risks of merging with another company or an acquisition that would allow Venus Widgets to expand globally.
• Discuss the different strategies that would need to be implemented in order to have a smooth merger.
• Discuss the strategies that would need to be implemented if the CEO and Board were to choose an acquisition instead of a merger. Would they be the same or different from the merger strategies? Why or why not?
• Discuss how a merger or acquisition would help the company expand its business so that the CEO may convince the board of directors.
• Your paper should be a minimum of 3 pages, using proper APA formatting and including at least 3 credible sources cited in your paper through in-text citations. Include an APA formatted title page and reference page. Your paper should also be free of grammatical errors.
• Suggested library databases to research these topics include Business Source Complete via EBSCO and Business via ProQuest for articles, and Safari Business eBooks and eBooks via EBSCO for eBooks.

*A note about credible sources: Credible sources are reliable, accurate, and trustworthy. These sources are written by authors respected in their fields of study. You want to identify sources where the author of the article is listed, if they’ve referenced other information, the sources should be cited so that you can check for the accuracy of and support what they have written. Wikipedia is not considered a credible source.