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Most mature organizations face a major decline in performance at some time during their existence. For more than three decades, it has been suggested that the management practices that could cure a troubled company could have also kept it well. Inspired by this concept, this paper is proposing a preventive approach to early implementation of turnaround strategies as an alternative for otherwise traumatic rescue efforts, further along the downward spiral.

Corporate turnaround strategies and associated risks are integrated with a risk-based approach, along with a proactive decision-making process. The link between turnaround research, resource-based view, the sources of organizational decline, and the governance of organizational-decline-related risks – is explained.

The integrated model streamlines a preventive organizational process for considering the suitability of commonly used turnaround practices – for the non-crisis business routine of a mature company. By considering and adjusting the risks associated with such practices, it addresses risk aversion at the early stages of decline and determines the optimal sequence and timing of retrenchment and recovery activities. As such, it encourages mature companies to take actions for reducing their exposure to organizational decline. Accordingly, the model is named the “Anti-Aging” framework.

Empirical testing of the suitability of turnaround strategies for non-crisis situations is proposed as a direction for future research.

The Anti-Aging framework opens an opportunity for the senior management of a mature organization to respond earlier to organizational decline and avoid the trauma associated with otherwise more challenging conditions, for the benefit of all stakeholders.

The Anti-Aging framework proposes an innovative way of bridging the gap between the benefits of early implementation of turnaround strategies, and major obstacles faced by willing, traditional management teams of mature organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework for assessing the risks of turnaround projects in upstream oil process plants.

This study represents a new hybrid framework for turnaround project risk assessment. First, according to experts’ opinions, the project risks were identified using interviews and brainstorming. The most important risks selected by experts and a hybrid multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) method used to assess and prioritize them. The proposed MADM method uses fuzzy step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and fuzzy evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) methods based on trapezoidal fuzzy numbers.

In this research, 28 usual risks of turnaround projects are identified and 10 risks are then selected as the most important ones. The findings show, that among the risks of upstream oil industry turnaround projects from the perspective of experts, the risk of timely financing by the employer, with an appraisal score of 0.83, has the highest rank among the risks and the risk of machine and equipment failure during operation, with an appraisal score of 0.04, has the lowest rank.

The risk analysis based on inputs collected from the experts in the Iranian upstream oil industry, and so the generalization of the results is limited to the context of developing countries, especially oil producer ones. However, the proposed risk analysis methodology and key insights developed can be useful for researchers and practitioners in any other process industry everywhere.

A novel framework for risk assessment is introduced for turnaround projects in the oil industry using MADM methods. There is no literature on using MADM methods for turnaround project risk analysis in the oil and gas industries. Furthermore, this paper presents a hybrid fuzzy method based on SWARA and EDAS.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the program structure and design considerations of a 25-day, full-time apprenticeship in a university-based principal preparation program.

The study used a qualitative case study design that drew upon interviews and focus groups with program participants as well as program-related documents. Qualitative data analysis was completed using ATLAS.ti.

The analysis suggests that the apprenticeship had three specific design features that were intended to support the apprentice’s development for turnaround leadership. These included locating the apprenticeship experience in a turnaround school setting; focusing the apprenticeship on district structures and procedures; and situating the apprentice’s work within the district’s approved improvement process.

The study was limited in that recurring, on-site observations of apprenticeship activities were not possible. The study has implications for principal preparation programs related to the design of fieldwork experiences, as well as for educational scholars seeking to study the impact of fieldwork on principal efficacy.

The study contributes to the broader discussion of effective fieldwork experiences for aspiring school leaders, particularly when specific conceptions of leadership are infused within program designs.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nature of request for information (RFIs) on construction projects by using data analytics to understand the frequency of RFIs, when they occur on projects, and the relationship between project characteristics and frequency of RFIs and between project characteristics and RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic approach using RStudio and Minitab software on 168 construction project cases in Australia and New Zealand involving 1,032,949 correspondences and 53,042 RFI event records made available by Aconex, one of the world largest cloud-based project management platform.

Large and complex projects tend to have significantly larger number of RFI events per day and longer RFI turnaround when compared with smaller and less complex projects. Projects with fewer users per organisation recorded a higher RFI turnaround time when compared with projects with more users per organisation – users mean persons involved in managing the project using the online platform (an index of project complexity). RFIs occur early on less complex projects and occur later on more complex projects.

Benchmarks of RFI incidences and turnaround time have been developed for various project characteristics and, practitioners can use them to monitor the RFI performance of projects. Organisations need to pay greater attention to staffing levels needed to handle RFIs to reduce RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic study of RFI yielded insights for managing RFIs. The findings of previous studies on RFIs are difficult to generalise because they are based on single project case study. The influence of project characteristics on RFI frequency and RFI turnaround time is not yet known.

Reports on a study into the company turnaround process in the Australian heavy engineering industry. Provides insights into the company regeneration phenomenon with particular emphasis on the marketing approaches taken by turnaround companies. The methodology employed in the study is qualitative in nature, which is appropriate in terms of the aims of the research, and the number of companies actively engaged in turnaround at any one time. Successfully turned around firms appear to engage in a process of “market manipulation”, as they fight to survive, give new meaning to their world, and develop their destiny in a very competitive marketplace.

Despite an improved understanding of the role of top executives in declining firms, research is still needed to explore the role of environmental scanning and strategy formulation processes in an organizational decline context. Drawing from the attention‐based view and the literature on environmental scanning, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship among executive attention patterns, industry dynamism and corporate turnaround performance in declining firms.

In order to test theoretically‐driven hypotheses, data were collected from 70 US manufacturing firms that experienced serious performance decline and subsequent performance turnaround between 1990‐2000. The hypothesized relationships among market‐related, input‐related environmental scanning, industry dynamism and corporate turnaround performance were tested using a moderated regression analysis.

The findings indicate that declining firms operating in dynamic industry environments tend to improve their turnaround performance when executives focus their attention more on market‐related sectors (i.e. customer, competitor and technological sectors). Conversely, the findings also indicated that corporate turnaround performance of declining firms seems to be adversely affected by a disproportionate focus on input‐related sectors of the task environment (i.e. suppliers and creditors).

The paper's findings contribute to the ongoing corporate turnaround research by highlighting the important role executive attention patterns and selective perceptions play in improving the extent of corporate turnaround in declining firms. More importantly, the findings also indicate that environmental context (in this case dynamism) is a critical part of successful corporate turnaround since it dictates the impact of relevant external actors on the organization.

Executives of declining firms attempting turnaround may find it particularly useful, based on the paper's findings, to focus their attention and information search on specific aspects of the task environment in order to facilitate corporate turnaround. Such focus becomes especially necessary if the declining firm is operating in dynamic industries.

The paper contributes to the corporate turnaround literature by highlighting the importance of both executive attention patterns and environmental context in any successful turnaround attempt.

Drawing on variables cited in the turnaround literature, this study aims to explore whether information contained within annual reports is useful in distinguishing between distressed companies that enact a turnaround and those that fail.

This study develops a discriminant model to identify distressed companies that have turnaround potential.

Analysis of the results reveals that successful turnarounds are associated with the severity of the distressed state, its determinants, with the extent of change in the distressed state since the previous year, and firm size.

This article is of use in identifying what information is useful in annual reports.

The paper aims to provide a longitudinal view of successful turnaround phases and of how management accounting practices played a significant role in improving performance in one company.

The company provided internal documents to cover the period of the study and permitted access to key individuals who were able to elaborate and clarify the motives which underpinned the numbers reported and the strategies employed.

The success of the corporate turnaround appeared to be attributable to an effective leadership style that was able to motivate and support the employees whilst making strategic changes to the organization's capital, financial well‐being and operations.

Recognition of the key factors in the turnaround process has implications for the implementation of corporate recovery strategies elsewhere.

States that, despite the rhetoric in the literature concerning the importance of information in the market‐planning process, there is scant attention to the “life blood of the planning process” in the published work on company turnarounds. Addresses this problem through a study of companies undergoing turnaround in the mature engineering industry. Compares the practices in three companies which were successfully turned around with a company in which turnaround attempts did not come to fruition. Finds that successful turnaround managers go through an elaborate process, “destiny development”, to establish the foundations of a turnaround plan. The turnaround plan relies heavily on sound and innovatively generated information. Explores the destiny development concept for theoretical and practical purposes.

This paper extends the current understanding of the retrenchment-–turnaround relationship in declined companies by introducing a compensation gap view. It argues that the effectiveness of the retrenchment strategy is contingent on reducing the executive-employee compensation gap in the turnaround process.

Drawing from a two-stage turnaround model and insights from the literature on executive-employee compensation gap, we develop and test a theoretical model that explains how five attributes, which refer to executive-employee compensation gap, asset retrenchment, cost retrenchment, ownership and size, affect the outcome of the organizational turnaround. This paper uses the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method and based on the samples of 112 listed companies that experience the decline between 2005 and 2013.

This paper concludes two valid causal paths and finds that small companies with small executive-employee compensation gap have a higher likelihood of successful turnaround when they implement cost or asset retrenchment actions. As for large state-owned companies, they should reduce the costs and maintain a small executive-employee compensation gap. An excessive compensation gap can be problematic, which could impair the organizational ability to cope with adversity and decline.

First, this paper taps the vital role of employees in the turnaround process besides the mainstream “organizational decline-layoffs” logic, which hints a new human resource management strategy when organizations are facing decline. Second, this paper reveals the theoretical linkage between pay dispersion, internal stakeholder and organizational resilience. Third, as a methodological contribution, we introduce fsQCA, overcoming the shortcomings of turnaround strategy research with case and regression analysis and breaking through the paradigm of “specific factor-turnaround.”

Organizational turnaround is a systematic process that constitutes multiple factors together. When organizations take the asset retrenchment to stop bleeding, reducing the executive-employee compensation gap will help enhance employee's cognition of organizational values and strategic goals, eliminate feelings of exploitation in retrenchment implementation and thus effectively promote turnaround. This paper also provides a basis for executive compensation restrictions and re-examines pay dispersion and economic inequality.

This study sheds some light on the importance of the executive-employee compensation gap in retrenchment strategy and contributes to both organizational turnaround and pay dispersion theories. Also, it reveals the theoretical linkage between internal stakeholders, organizational resilience and long-term orientation.