Turnaround management: corporate renewal and restructuring during times of financial distress

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the fundamental process of corporate renewal and re-structure, to prescribe a common set of actions leading to turnaround success.

Business failure and winding-up are of growing concern in the business community where the complexity of the environment and the tough global competition can turn into distress.
The context of the research is the study of the advanced status of crisis for an organisation, which cannot be any longer ignored without seriously compromising its future: the so called ‘turnaround management’. While exploring turnaround management, the work focuses in underpin the extent of quality leadership as key for success.

Through an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of practical research, this dissertation also aims to assess the validity of the main turnaround models recommended by executives, professionals and academic writers. The latter is carried out through the comparison of two Case Studies: Fiat & IBM Groups.

This research produced a number of key findings: recent surveys confirm a significant increase of bankruptcies but even many successful turnaround cases. Successful restructures like Apple or Nokia corporations are evidence of objective possibility to become newly profitable if the right strategies are adopted.
The research conclusion recommends companies to enforce a structure able to actively prevent changes in environment. This will help in limiting the risk to fall in distress.

Those organisations with a lack in their capacity may still steam the distress addressing the remaining resources toward the correct actions following the turnaround management best practice.

This research argues for a multi-pronged model to reduce the risk of business close down. One that takes into account risk-assessment and problem correction models, including management & company policies, implementation issues, priority definition and, more than other factor the need for management of a new mind setting.