Turnarounds and Company Revitalization
Dr. Frederick M. Zimmerman has written extensively on company revitalization, has given many presentations on company revitalization, and has served on the boards of directors of more than ten companies. His assertion is that low-cost, high product differentiation, and appropriate leadership are all essential conditions for company revitalization. The stories related in both The Turnaround Experience and Achieving Success in Difficult Times are all real-world cases describing not only technical details, but also characteristics of the people involved.
The Turnaround Experience was written in 1987 and published by McGraw Hill in 1991. It was a longitudinal study of sixteen companies involved in the automotive and agricultural equipment industries. All of these companies experienced severe business reversals at different times in their histories. Seven of these cases were unsuccessful -- usually resulting in complete withdrawal from industries where they had partcipated as meaningful competitors for many years. Nine of the cases were successful as the companies emerged from the periods of difficulty to become strong successful and healthy competitors for many years in their industries.
Each case was examined over a twenty-year period; three years before the difficulty, three years during the difficulty and for fourteen following years, so the success of failure of the actions taken could be carefully studied.
The differences between the successful and unsuccessful cases were critically analyzed with many resulting lessons for business leaders.
The second book, Achieving Success in Difficult Times used some of the basic data from the Turnaround Experience, but applies it to a more contemporary time period for application to the many competitive issues our companies face today.
