Published Articles
Most business turnarounds fail. Here's why the best ones cut to strength
As companies look to successfully achieve a corporate turnaround, success or failure depends on the speed of their actions and the depth of commitment from leadership. Without aligned governance and adequate funding, even well-intentioned change efforts can stall before delivering results.
Layoffs Are The Easy Way Out: There Are Smarter paths To Cost Discipline
Amidst strong economic headwinds and the demonstrated potential of AI, business leaders face growing pressure to preserve margins and demonstrate financial discipline — a goal they're increasingly accomplishing through workforce reductions. One in five major U.S. companies currently employs fewer people than they did a decade ago.
Post-Merger Priorities: How Boards Like Kroger's Can Lead Through Market Uncertainty
Failed mergers create perfect storms of executive departures, talent flight and investor lawsuits, but they also offer strategic reset opportunities. Using Kroger’s post-Albertsons crisis as a case study, Alvarez & Marsal’s Conor Johnston maps the three-pronged approach boards need to transform regulatory setbacks into competitive repositioning.
Balancing strategic tradeoffs and leadership transparency during challenging transformations
A difficult economic environment has put pressure on companies to operate in a new era of financial discipline. Whether driven by economic volatility, competitive pressures or the need to free up capital for new investments, businesses are tightening their belts and making hard choices about costs, resources and priorities.
Ditch Your Growth Obsession And Focus On Profit
The era of relentless corporate expansion has ended, exposed by rising interest rates and technological disruption—a shift that’s undermined the growth-at-all-costs mentality that shaped corporate America over the last decade. Survival now demands that companies ruthlessly prioritize profitability, strategic focus and sustainable financial management over blind expansion, changing the rules for successful CEOs.
How CEOs Should Handle Big Bets That Fail
Apple has quietly closed the book on its autonomous car project, having spent almost a decade and several billion dollars on the effort. But Apple’s failure with its big bet shouldn’t scare CEOs away from high profile gambles: rather, it underscores the importance of ensuring that big, ambitious projects align tightly with the company’s vision, mission and capabilities.
The clock is ticking on ESSER funds
Superintendents in the middle of the budget-setting process need to be aware: with the ESSER Funds soon to go away, reporting, supplementing, and storytelling their pandemic-related expenses will be key for longterm student success.
Can Companies Under Anti-Trust Scrutiny Keep The Earnings Growth Coming?
Some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are ensnared in antitrust lawsuits, and it looks like more are on the way. Can tech companies manage to ke...
Reputation Repair: The Potential and Limits of Boeing's Next CEO
Boeing is replacing its current CEO amidst apparent systemic issues with its manufacturing process and a steadily declining stock price. The job of the next CEO will be to steer the badly off-cou...
How to Extract Game-Changing Innovations from Your Team
As Apple shutters its plans for a self-driving car, investors (and certainly Apple leadership) are curious about where the company's next big bet will come from. With the speed of innovation rapidly increasing across the market, companies like...
What CEOs can learn from Disney's proxy fight with activist investor Norman Peltz
Disney remains locked in an ongoing struggle with activist investor Nelson Peltz, rejecting his bid for board seats and...
Educators must now emphasize the humans in the ChatGPT loop
Just over a year since the introduction of ChatGPT to the public, educators in school districts of every size and demographic description are grappling with the massive implications of AI and large language models (LLMs) on their students, teache...
Fear Itself: CEOs Boldly Leading During Uncertainty Are Tomorrow's Winners
Warning signals of a pending recession keep flashing, but the employment statistics keep saying no. The economy's path forward feels remarkably uncertain and has real upside. For example, highly credible experts forecast AI-turbocharged g...
Lessons For CEOs And Boards From Meta's Turnaround
Just a year ago, analysts and investors following Meta were wondering if they were witnessing the beginning of the end for what was once one of tech's brightest stars. The company, one of the 30 most profitable companies in the world, had spent...
District leaders: Act now to avoid financial disasters after COVID relief funding ends
Districts must plan to identify and mitigate impending budget gaps and build strategies for long-term financial health
Among all institutions impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, few faced challenges as profound and fast-moving as Ameri...