A management survival guide for and about troubled companies and the challenges of turnarounds.

Publisher Comments

Category: Bankruptcy & Restructuring This title is part of the Turnarounds list. Of Interest: Corporate Recovery: Managing Companies in Distress Corporate Turnaround: How Managers Turn Losers Into Winners! Hospital Turnarounds: Lessons in Leadership Small Business Bankruptcy Reorganizations  The Turnaround Manager's Handbook The Executive Guide to Corporate Bankruptcy

Strained financial resources, demoralized executives, fearful employees, unhappy customers, tense bankers, angry investors, and competitors waiting to pounce -- these are the classic challenges of turnarounds and troubled companies. Taking Charge is a management survival guide that explores the dynamics of troubled companies from the perspective of a turnaround pro, providing a step-by-step plan for success that is punctuated with real-world examples.

Topics include cash control, banking relationships, leadership style, entrepreneurship, equity versus debt, and downsizing and reorganization -- must reading not only for managers of troubled companies, but also for those in relatively stable companies anxious to avoid turnaround status. The principles first set forth in the original edition published in 1987 are still valid in this 1999 reprint edition.

Review by Susan Pannell
From Turnarounds and Workouts, May 15, 1999

Remember when Lee Iacocca was practically a national hero? He won celebrity status by taking charge at a company so universally known as troubled tht humor columnist joked their kids grew up thinking the corporate name was "Ayling Chrysler." Whatever else Iacocca may have been, he was a leader, and leadership is crucial to a successful turnaround, maintains the author.

Mediagenic names merit only passing references in Whitney's book, however. The author's own considerable experience as a turnaround pro has given him more than sufficient perspective and acumen to guide managers through successful turnarounds without resorting to name-dropping. While Whitney states that he "share(s) no personal war stories" in this book, it was nonetheless, written from inside the "shoes, skin and skull of a turnaround leader." That sense of immediacy, of urgency and intensity, makes Taking Charge compelling reading even for the executive who feels he or she has already mastered the literature of turnarounds.

Whitney divides the work into two parts. Part I is succinctly entitled "Survival," and sets out the rules for taking charge within the crucial first 120 days. "The leader rarely succeeds who is not clearly in charge by the end of his fourth month," Whitney notes. Cash budgeting, the mainstay of a successful turnaround, is given attention in almost every chapter. Woe to the inexperience manager who views accounts receivable management as "an arcane activity 'handled over in accounting.'" Whitney sets out 50 questions concerning AR that the leader must deal with -- not academic exercises, but requirements for survival.

Other internal sources for cash, including judiciously managed accounts payable and inventory, asset restructuring, and expense cuts, are discussed. External sources of cash, among them banks, asset lenders, and venture capital funds; factoring receivables; and the use of trust receipts and field warehousing, are handled in detail. Although cash, cash, and more cash is the drumbeat of Part I, Whitney does not slight other subjects requiring attention. Two chapters, for example, help the turnaround manager assess how the company got into the mess in the first place, and develop strategies for getting out of it.

The critical subject of cash continues to resonate throughout Part II, "Profit and Growth," although here the turnaround leader consolidates his gains and looks ahead as the turnaround matures. New financial, new organizational and new marketing arrangements are laid out in detail. Whitney also provides a checklist for the leader t o use in brainstorming strategic options for the future.

Whitney's underlying theme -- that a successful business requires personal leadership as well as bricks and mortar, money and machinery -- is summed up in a concluding chapter that analyzes the qualities that make a leader. His advice is as relevant in this 1999 reprint edition as it was in 1987 when first published.

James D. Miller, Managing Partner, Arthur Andersen & Co.

A step-by-step how-to book that discusses turnarounds in a straightfoward, no-nonsense manner.

Columbia University

(The books is) a bible for the turnaround business.

This book is about turnarounds, my background.  Turnarounds and start-ups have many similarities.  Find this book.  It is excellent. 

John O. Whitney is Professor of Management and Executive Director of the Deming Center for Quality Management at Columbia Business School. He is a member of the board of Directors of several companies, including Turner Corp., Church and Dwight Corp., and Atchison Castings Corp., and on the advisory board at Newsbank Corp. Recent consulting assignments include Alcoa Corp., Wickes Lumber, Rodale Press, Sunstar, Inc., the Zimmer Division of Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Lab Glass Division of Corning, inc., Merck & Co., W.R. Grace, Nashua Corporation, and IBM. His speaking engagements include an even larger number of companies, and he has written for numerous leading business publications.

home    |    about us     |     contact us    |     related sites