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

5 pointsby Cherianvor 13 Jahren3 comments

What does history teach us about this?

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.

Some situations I had to go through as an employee:

Press is never good.

Human capital starts hemorrhaging

Leading to buggy product sand releases. Quality drops dramatically. Customer service to bugs to lunches.

Cafeteria conversations are never positive.

You start to see hopes fade despite the salaries.

Everything management communicates will seem like a lie.

There is a lot of “strategically realigning” corporate talk

From recent times:

Marissa Mayer taking over Yahoo

Don Mattrick taking over Zynga

X going to take over Microsoft

Y to take over BlackBerry

Sony….

If I remember, pg talked about acquisitions as a way to jump out of the spiral.

What are the other strategies that you have seen?

2 comments

GFischervor 13 Jahren

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.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/

GFischervor 13 Jahren

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.

viennacodervor 13 Jahren

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