Turnaround: How to Change Course When Things Are Going South

by Lisa Gable

Overview

Is your once-thriving organization stuck? Is your team on life support, unable to deliver on its potential? Is your initiative or campaign limping along instead of sprinting ahead? 

Wall Street Journal bestselling author and turnaround mastermind, Lisa Gable offers a clear-headed, straightforward method for getting you back on track.  For more than 30 years, Lisa Gable has been called to turnaround failing organizations—businesses, teams, nonprofits, political campaigns, and government projects—and solve seemingly intractable problems. From Silicon Valley to Washington DC, she’s seen it all. Over time, she’s learned the key to course-correct when things go South is applying the discipline of process engineering—carefully reevaluating everything your organization does and how it does it—with diplomacy and humanity, taking care of relationships, and forging strong partnerships.

In Turnaround, Gable shares her simple but powerful method for breathing new life into the most troubled ventures:

• Visualize the future—don’t fix what’s there; start from scratch.
• Break down the present—ditch what isn’t working; keep what does. 
• Create a path to your future—map out critical decisions and actions needed.
• Execute with confidence and diplomacy—speed up by partnering well with others.
  

At a time when dizzying innovation cycles, hyper-competition, and a global pandemic have made survival more challenging than ever, Gable’s time-tested and industry-proof method will give you the tools to turn your ship around and chart a course to success.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646870585
Publisher:	Ideapress Publishing
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

LISA GABLE is recognized worldwide as a turnaround mastermind. As a CEO, former US Ambassador, and advisor to Fortune 500 companies, Lisa has orchestrated the successful turnarounds of private and public organizations in all industries. She is the CEO of FARE, the world's premiere organization fighting food allergies, and was named one of the 10 Most Innovative Businesswomen in 2020 by The Business Berg. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

2021-09-20
A program for turning around downward-spiraling businesses and projects.

Drawing on three decades of helping organizations solve seemingly intractable problems, Gable presents the tenets and principles of her method for turning around situations when things go south and all hope seems lost. “The organization is hobbled by competition,” she posits, or “a revolving door of project leads, managers, consultants, and leaders” try without success to fix the problem. She begins by breaking down some of the most common reasons why things go wrong—founders stick around long after their original dreams and motivations have become outdated, bosses indulge in company-damaging hubris, the raw economics of the project make its ultimate results impossible, and, perhaps most importantly, managers become stuck in one “cookie-cutter” model and resist trying new things. Gable writes, “Today we recognize that to solve problems creatively, you need as many diverse voices working on them as possible.” Gable claims that her method has been “battle-tested” out in the real world, and it’s based on four basic steps: visualizing the future, analyzing the past, creating a plan to move from the present to the future, and then executing that plan with “speed, confidence, and heart.” Gable fleshes out these general principles with specific examples from her own past and case studies where her ideas have been executed properly.Her own anecdotes, all smoothly and invitingly told, are all teamwork stories (when she’s hired as CEO of a food allergy research company, for instance, the changes she describes are all community-based, as are so many descriptions throughout the book). A crucial current running through the various “turnaround” principles is an implicit rejection of the savior complex that tends to rule the roost in the business world. As Gable’s recollections make clear over and over, salvaging an impossibly tangled situation requires an all-hands-on-deck approach. “You want to incentivize everyone involved in your turnaround to invest, work with you, and execute in a matter that supports the new future.” That “new future” is another key feature of Gable’s outlook: Although the temptation in any debacle is to obsess over the mess, Gable emphasizes the importance of having a clear plan for the future as the ultimate counterbalance to finger-pointing. She refreshingly ranges her advice regarding where a problem might reside, from a flawed corporate vision to poor management of assets. And although some readers may find her personal business-world anecdotes a bit too excessive (they very much outweigh the book’s more theoretical portions), those stories serve an important cumulative purpose: They show her principles in action, demonstrating how they work in real situations with real people. “Change brings anxiety,” she writes. “People feel bounced around as their reality shifts, and uncertainty grows.” Those “bounced around” people—Gable’s readers who’ve found themselves caught up in some horribly dysfunctional problem—will find a good deal of hard-won wisdom in these pages.

A vigorously written, ultimately encouraging method for rescuing a messed-up situation.

Kirkus Reviews