I have a lot of experience in book marketing; and I am a top reviewer at Amazon. A sample of my writing follows: LEADING CORPORATE TURNAROUND - How Leaders Fix Troubled Companies by Stuart Slatter, David Lovett, and Laura Barlow.
In their previous books republished by BeardBooks in 2004 with the title "Corporate Recovery," these authors identified seven essential elements that are a part of any successful turnaround. With this, they also "described what [italicized in original] turnaround practitioners need to do" with respect to these and ancillary elements. This new book from the authors moves onto the ground of "how [italicized in original] leading turnaround practitioners provide leadership" for each of the essential elements identified in their earlier book. The content of this second book is mostly from interviews with more than 80 such practitioners with the authors' own experiences and lessons from their work in corporate turnarounds.
Whereas the author's first book was relatively abstract or formal in that it analyzed distressed corporations to identify the major factors for their condition and advised how turnaround practitioners should approach dealing with each, this following book relates the analyses, ideas, activities, and goals of practitioners in specific cases of distressed companies. In this book, the authors focus is not what leadership a turnaround practitioner should provide, but means to describe how leadership was actually provided in real-life matters of survival of specific corporations.
The effectiveness of such leadership depends mainly, and in many cases critically on when the turnaround specialist is brought in. The rule is the sooner the better once management recognizes when a business is in trouble such that it requires outside help. This could be many months before the actual, concrete turnaround work involving the entire business begins. While the time when a turnaround practitioner should first be consulted is not questionable, the point or phase when the practitioner should bow out is open. This point or phase is related to the somewhat theoretical question of when the turnaround is done. This answer to this is more complicated than an answer to whether a company has been stabilized in its troubles or whether there have been marked improvements in the distressed situation. When a turnaround has been accomplished is an important question because only some turnaround practitioners are able to change their leadership style relying heavily on motivation and implementation of new practices in the beginning and early stages of a turnaround to the style of patient and judicious nurture of these and management of them over the long term.
The authors have no answer for when a turnaround ends. From their experiences and the numerous interviews however, they do cite two key guidelines of a turnaround helpful in assessing when it is at its end. One of these is a time frame; the second, the type of activities within this time frame. "The turnaround process implies the need to achieve rapid performance improvement, usually within a 6 to 18 month time frame, and sometimes even sooner. The need to deliver short-term results is what turnaround practitioners focus on; leaving the longer term success of the company to a subsequent leader."
The relatively short time frame and the critical turnaround work needed to be done within it have correlations to the leadership qualities needed by the effective turnaround specialist and the kind of tasks that have to be focused on. Among the tasks listed by the authors are "instilling an immediate sense of urgency and performance orientation into the distressed company" and "developing and communicating a vision for the business." The authors then continue throughout the book to relate advice, experiences, means, and specifics for accomplishing these in the areas of crisis stabilization, stockholder management, strategic focus, changing critical business processes, leading the organizational change, and financial restructuring.
The skilled format is helpful to the reader without simplifying the complex challenge of a turnaround. Frequent quotes from experts highlighted in italics, occasional bulleted lists, insets with gray backgrounds (called "boxes"), graphs and charts, short subchapters with titles in bold, and lastly a detailed index work with the authoritative basic text to make for a work that presents the range of aspects involved in a turnaround and is a reliable handbook on specifics of these.
