Corporate Turnaround

Rating:
Summary: Corporate Turnaround
Review: Crisp succinct and to the point. A good book!

Rating:
Summary: Recovery Bible
Review: The work of Slatter and Lovett covers all aspects of company turnaround and can be, with some restrictions, used as a valuable help during crisis management.

This model stresses an overlap of planning and implementation activities. Crisis management and regular business planning have to be handled simultaneously and a number of generic strategies implemented parallel and vigorously, which pays contribute to the extreme time pressure in a crisis situation.

The model takes a holistic approach by including aspects of leadership and stakeholder confidence, but the author misses mechanisms that allow the flexibility for a basic strategy change as a reaction to an altering environment.

Remarkable is that the workstream of the development of the business plan only is limited to mid stage of the emergency phase. This could be an indication that in Slatter's and Lovett's concept the business plan has a rather static and inflexible structure. If writing the business plan is considered a process that constantly has to be adapted to the changing environment, then the development of the business plan should stretch over all phases of the turnaround process. Also naming the business plan the "Bible of Recovery" implies that the once developed strategies are chiseled in stone.

The static character of the business plan in this model is circumstantiated by the fact that a major element in their business plan is a description of the desired business in its end state, which sets the course of company development on fixed bearings too rigidly and does not allow it to steer around a possible storm.

Like the model of Schaffer and Thomson they constantly review the progress of development in their implementation report, which they call a dynamic living document. This is a functional and important tool to keep the turnaround momentum moving, but they use this information merely as a performance measure to analyze, improve and document the actions, which lead to the achievements of set targets and deadlines, without reflecting, if those targets or strategies are still relevant or need to be adjusted. Therefore this concept cannot fully utilize the essential learning effect, is not flexible in reformulating its strategies, if necessary, and has no mechanisms to institutionalize refinements.

There is only one small contribution in the work of Slatter and Lovett towards strategic flexibility. Under "critical situations during implementation" they mention that an initiative should be amended, if the performance analysis of the implementation report recognizes an underperformance caused by an invalid assumption. They describe this though as a rather isolated event, which has no strong influence on the overall strategic process.

The author considers one reason, why Slatter and Lovett take a more static approach towards the business plan lies in one of the general advantages of a crisis situation, which is the necessity of overlapping of planning and implementation. By this the time gap between planning and implementation is fairly short and the chances that the environment changes drastically are fairly slim although they exist, as the September 11 event showed. This statement counts for the analysis-, emergency- and strategic change phase. But since the concept of Slatter and Lovett also reach into the growth phase until company renewal has been established the author believes it should establish mechanisms, which allow for a strategic change.

The author concludes from the above, that the concept of Slatter and Lovett can be used as a valuable approach towards crisis management , if it is augmented with the constant learning and reformulating principles of Schaffer and Thomson, Pelz and other authors who state that capturing the essential learning effect should be the core achievement of a business plan.

Rating:
Summary: Recovery Bible
Review: The work of Slatter and Lovett covers all aspects of company turnaround and can be, with some restrictions, used as a valuable help during crisis management.

This model stresses an overlap of planning and implementation activities. Crisis management and regular business planning have to be handled simultaneously and a number of generic strategies implemented parallel and vigorously, which pays contribute to the extreme time pressure in a crisis situation.

The model takes a holistic approach by including aspects of leadership and stakeholder confidence, but the author misses mechanisms that allow the flexibility for a basic strategy change as a reaction to an altering environment.

Remarkable is that the workstream of the development of the business plan only is limited to mid stage of the emergency phase. This could be an indication that in Slatter's and Lovett's concept the business plan has a rather static and inflexible structure. If writing the business plan is considered a process that constantly has to be adapted to the changing environment, then the development of the business plan should stretch over all phases of the turnaround process. Also naming the business plan the "Bible of Recovery" implies that the once developed strategies are chiseled in stone.

The static character of the business plan in this model is circumstantiated by the fact that a major element in their business plan is a description of the desired business in its end state, which sets the course of company development on fixed bearings too rigidly and does not allow it to steer around a possible storm.

Like the model of Schaffer and Thomson they constantly review the progress of development in their implementation report, which they call a dynamic living document. This is a functional and important tool to keep the turnaround momentum moving, but they use this information merely as a performance measure to analyze, improve and document the actions, which lead to the achievements of set targets and deadlines, without reflecting, if those targets or strategies are still relevant or need to be adjusted. Therefore this concept cannot fully utilize the essential learning effect, is not flexible in reformulating its strategies, if necessary, and has no mechanisms to institutionalize refinements.

There is only one small contribution in the work of Slatter and Lovett towards strategic flexibility. Under "critical situations during implementation" they mention that an initiative should be amended, if the performance analysis of the implementation report recognizes an underperformance caused by an invalid assumption. They describe this though as a rather isolated event, which has no strong influence on the overall strategic process.

The author considers one reason, why Slatter and Lovett take a more static approach towards the business plan lies in one of the general advantages of a crisis situation, which is the necessity of overlapping of planning and implementation. By this the time gap between planning and implementation is fairly short and the chances that the environment changes drastically are fairly slim although they exist, as the September 11 event showed. This statement counts for the analysis-, emergency- and strategic change phase. But since the concept of Slatter and Lovett also reach into the growth phase until company renewal has been established the author believes it should establish mechanisms, which allow for a strategic change.

The author concludes from the above, that the concept of Slatter and Lovett can be used as a valuable approach towards crisis management , if it is augmented with the constant learning and reformulating principles of Schaffer and Thomson, Pelz and other authors who state that capturing the essential learning effect should be the core achievement of a business plan.