Career Focus

This course is intended for students pursuing a range of career options as business executives, investors, and/or consultants. First, it would be of interest to those who at some point in their career see themselves as a CEO or senior manager potentially leading a troubled enterprise (small, medium, or large) through a crisis or through significant performance transformation. Secondly, it would be important for investors dealing with distressed organizations needing restructuring or significant performance improvement. Finally, it will be of value to those who expect to support or interface with troubled enterprises as management consultants or as a restructuring advisors.

Educational Objectives

The focus of this course is the leader as a strategist, architect, decision maker, and change agent in a turnaround or transformation environment. This course will present situations where you can analyze potential opportunity in turnaround situations and decide if there is a reasonable chance for the managers in the case to create value. It will also present many situations where you will be challenged to develop a plan of action for the managers that will lead to the creation and realization of value.

Our curriculum will include a number of practical ‘how to’ sessions covering topics such as designing turnaround programs, successfully driving necessary cultural change, and transformation performance management techniques and systems. Some of these sessions will include and be co-taught with practicing executives and advisors. In others, we will invite case protagonists and guest speakers who have decades of hands-on experience to share with the class.

The course will be structured around several turnaround levers—some connected with planning and some with execution. The course will open and close with sessions devoted to analyzing leadership skills fundamental to planning and executing successful turnarounds.

Course Content and Organization

The course will include some brand-new cases with the CEO protagonists present in class, in order to give students first-hand exposure to turnaround challenges. We will look at a range of organizations, including small and large companies, family-owned ventures, private and public firms, and US and international companies.

We will structure the course around several turnaround levers that leaders use to transform businesses--both those in need of comprehensive turnarounds and those momentarily facing lackluster performance.

We will also adopt a holistic view of turnarounds that combines the analysis of strategy, organization, operations, culture, and finance. While these elements are analytically distinct, we will examine how they interact with and shape each other to either (1) preserve cash; (2) create a new value proposition and/or (3) unlock new growth avenues.

There will be synthesis segments after each group of cases to solidify learnings connected with each turnaround lever.

The opening and closing of the course will be devoted to analyzing leadership skills fundamental to planning and executing successful turnarounds. We will examine, among others, the importance of personal and organizational resilience, the management of critical thinking (logos), emotions (pathos), and relationships (ethos), and the challenges involved in professionalizing a leadership team in a crisis.

This course will be 25 class sessions that will be primarily case-oriented with some additional readings and high-profile in-class speakers, along with two project days.

This course complements Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring and Financial Management of Smaller Firms.

Final Paper

Students will work in teams of three or four. Each team will choose an organization that has undergone a recent turnaround. The turnaround effort must have ended or be advanced enough to allow in-depth analysis.

Students will examine the turnaround process by applying the tools and principles from the course. In the write-up, I expect that you will explain the challenges the organization faced and how it dealt with them (2000 word description of the turnaround effort and why you chose it) and what you learned (separate 500 word analysis using tools and principles from the course, plus your own recommendations for the company).

A more detailed summary of the outline for this paper will be provided at the start of the term.

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