Business Turnaround Quotes

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

Most turnarounds don’t turn.

My low point was after being reorganized out of running Merrill Lynch. That dismissal deeply contradicted my sense of fairness, since, at the time, my team and I had done what we were brought in to do: We had turned Merrill Lynch around from the depths of the financial crisis.

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

There is no one thing that can turn around a rejection. But there is one answer: begin talking to your customers who have already bought from you and discover why they bought.

I spent most of my career operating businesses and fixing businesses, not staring at a Bloomberg screen.

If I have to tell you what was and is my mission, I think UBS can be the Apple or IBM of the banking industry: companies that went from being admired to severe difficulties and to being back stronger than before.

When I became CEO of Xerox 10 years ago, the company's situation was dire. Debt was mounting, the stock sinking and bankers were calling. People urged me to declare bankruptcy, but I felt personally responsible for tens of thousands of employees.

When I became CEO, Puma was bankrupt on paper.

Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.

We bought the UFC when not only was it a bankrupt company that was going under, it had a horrible stigma attached to it. This thing was so bad it was not allowed on pay-per-view.

The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead.

And I was asked if I would come and help with the recovery of this great British company, Cable and Wireless, and I'm delighted to become part of the new and very talented management that have been brought in to that company as well.

I guess that's one achievement I'm really proud of. Saving Chrysler was more than jobs, more than shareholder value. Saving Chrysler was a good idea for the whole country.

Too many people who come in as CEO of a poorly performing company assume that none of the incumbent executives are worth retaining. That's not always the case. Sometimes the talent is there, but it's not being led well.

Whether it's mending a failing company, fighting corruption, tackling disease, or rebuilding a marriage, the hardest problems defy just-add-water remedies. Indeed, slapping on a Band-Aid when surgery is needed usually just makes things worse.

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble...We want to buy them when they're on the operating table.

In 1980, aided by $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government and his own pitchman routines on television, Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the abyss.

We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan; Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.

My job was to turn the company around and to give Time Warner a profitable Web business to spin off and a profitable access business that still throws off a tremendous amount of cash. I can check both of those boxes. I am done, and I feel good about what we've accomplished.

Because I didn't have much money, I bought a small shop that fit my budget. The previous six owners had closed their business in three years. The store had no people traffic and, because of that, I was able to focus on figuring out how to provide a better service to each and every one of the customers that did come through.

My biggest mistake was when I started up easyEverything, a chain of Internet cafes. The idea that people would go to a shop to use a computer was revolutionary in 1999. It worked for a while, but cheap technology almost killed it. One silver lining of the problems I faced was that it gave me experience of turnarounds.

Auntie Anne's is a modern-day business miracle that never should have happened.