Business turnarounds are useful to study because they are so high stakes. In many ways, they offer a microcosm of various business concepts in practice:
You’ll see unvarnished leadership under pressure.
You get to observe business expertise in action.
But also, you get a compressed story of how businesses can fall onto hard times.
Business turnarounds should be part of the diet of anyone who is serious about studying business expertise.
How Jim Kilts cut through the noise in the first few months of the Gillette turnaround.
Alan Mullaly’s turnaround plan for the extremely political Ford Motor Company was built around a weekly metrics review meeting. This is how that worked.
How speciality running shoe brand Brooks refocused on performance running — and turned the company around.
How the ‘bad boys’ of the minicomputer boom made a name, made a fortune, and then went away.
How Bill Anders oversaw the disassembling of a defence contractor — and outperformed.
Apart from being a successful turnaround CEO, there is one other thing about Jim Kilts that is highly unusual: his ability to create a deep bench of executive leaders in every company he helmed. This is how he did it.