

Ask HN: How do you revive a company from a death spiral? - Cherian

What does history teach us about this?<p>I was part of a company that went down this path. It’s surreal in some ways. A company that was one positioned for “world domination” is suddenly in a “chaotic confused” state.<p>Some situations I had to go through as an employee:<p>Press is never good.<p>Human capital starts hemorrhaging<p>Leading to buggy product sand releases. Quality drops dramatically. Customer service to bugs to lunches.<p>Cafeteria conversations are never positive.<p>You start to see hopes fade despite the salaries.<p>Everything management communicates will seem like a lie.<p>There is a lot of “strategically realigning” corporate talk<p>From recent times:<p>Marissa Mayer taking over Yahoo<p>Don Mattrick taking over Zynga<p>X going to take over Microsoft<p>Y to take over BlackBerry<p>Sony….<p>If I remember, pg talked about acquisitions as a way to jump out of the spiral.<p>What are the other strategies that you have seen?
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GFischer
Hmm...your examples are dissimilar: Yahoo and Microsoft have very different
challenges than Blackberry or Nokia (they're in a much better position), and
I'd put Zynga in a third category.

That said: some notorious companies have executed big turnarounds from near-
death to leading.

The most notorious is of course Apple :) .

In the tech sector we've witnessed the reinvention of IBM (from mainframes to
services), mostly copied by HP.

Some articles:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-ten-biggest-
corpor...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-ten-biggest-corporate-
turnarounds-2011-02-03)

[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/)

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GFischer
One thing all turnarounds had in common: change starts at the top. Out with
the old CEO (and preferrably most of the upper management).

As you said, morale and bad press are huge issues. I think Yahoo! did pretty
well on those fronts with Mayer.

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viennacoder
It's almost impossible to do. You're better off leaving.

