The myth that 75% of all mergers fail has long been dispelled. It was based on a statistic related to announcement day effect that failed to capture the reality of corporate value creation. M&A does boost companies’ growth and value, our new research shows, but the bet-the-company deal isn’t the route to success. Indeed, infrequent large deals do tend to hurt value creation. Instead, it is a steady stream of transactions — known as programmatic M&A — that delivers the real wins. But these transactions need to reach particular thresholds of frequency and cumulative value to make a real impact.