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Existing models of decline and turnaround assume an automatic initiation of a turnaround strategy when decline occurs. However, extended decline over time suggests that the turnaround strategy did not match the causality and severity of the situation. Borrowing from the crisis management literature, this paper argues that a triggering event or events needs to shock incumbent management into realizing that different action is called for. Such triggering events, or triggers, also play a role in the turnaround process by influencing strategies and inducing management changes. Incorporating the need for, and role of, triggers in understanding the decline/turnaround sequence helps explain the iterative and non‐sequential nature of this process.

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.

Provides ten “back to basics” management practices that should be taken on board if management is able to successfully implement a turnaround strategy.

Draws on the experiences of turnaround management; presents scenarios illustrating typical problems experienced by companies; offers guidance on the management practices that should be adopted.

At some point in time many managers will face that sinking feeling when they realist that their company is fast approaching a financial crisis. Many factors can contribute to the financial problems of a company and manages are constantly challenged to keep on top of their organizations true financial situation. Turnaround strategies are recognised as being critical to re‐establish company viability and the business news contains stories of both companies that have successfully implemented turnaround strategies as well as many where management have failed. Identifying the problems in turnaround situations and finding the correct solution are simpler than they seem. Management, however, often make the mistake of neglecting the fundamentals of the situation and fail to focus on those issue that are, vital to achieving successful turnarounds. Listed are ten fundamentals that management neglect at their peril if they are to nurse their companies back to a state of financial health.

Offers expert advice from turnaround managers on the do's and don'ts of effectively implementing a turnaround strategy.

Provides advice to companies on how they can continue to perform effectively.

Offers ten “back to basics” management practices and provides examples and scenarios to illustrate the points made.

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.

Assuming that “change” is an ongoing, ordinary business condition, this paper seeks to introduce turnaround management as an ongoing management task to secure competitive advantage.

The paper briefly reviews the impact of market turmoil on successful corporate management with particular reference to the Romanian market. It includes key learning based on structured, qualitative interviews of executives (corporate CEOs and leading corporate banking managers). Building on it, the paper comments pitfalls out of several emprical case studies at Eastern European companies, lost in a deemed “ever‐lasting growth” trap while losing grip over their true roots of competitive advantage. It assumes that turnaround management and sustainability are not mutually exclusive corporate paradigms during times of incisive economic recession.

Ongoing turnaround management can be a successful key to achieve sustainable corporate performance improvement.

Turnaround refers to multiple stakeholders, market dynamics and corporate culture; hence it differs in different contexts. This might result in a slight limitation to generalizing the findings to other organization types. Replicating analogue research in different market contexts and corporate cultures would be a beneficial follow‐up research pattern.

Practical implications are ongoing turnaround management targets to anticipate corporate crisis. It includes multilateral perspectives (corporate executives' view, organizational support, external influencing forces, other stakeholder perspectives) and operates at different management levels (strategic scenarios, operative scenarios, decision and implementation management, monitoring and adapting). Mere cost reduction based management practices prove insufficient to maintain competitive advantage, even in times of incisive market turmoil.

The paper provides insights on different dimensions of turnaround management and the way it sustainably enhances corporate performance. It distinguishes its view from the frequently reactive and mainly cost‐cutting‐based character of turnaround management in management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a research study aimed at comparing the causes of organisational decline and turnaround strategies involved in cases of successful and unsuccessful turnarounds, with a view to identifying the differences, if any, between the two groups, which in turn is expected to provide useful information to academics, practitioners and policy makers.

Since turnaround is a business phenomenon of general interest, their stories are often published in business periodicals, which are a rich source of data on them. In order to tap this data source, the present paper employed a method of content analysis for the proposed investigation on the cause of organisational decline and turnaround strategies used. In order to quantify the data, a three-point scale was developed, where the presence of a cause/strategy is rated as “3”, its ambivalence as “2” and its absence as “1”, whose validity was assessed through the inter-rater agreement indices. The data thus generated are amenable to statistical analyses, using which the more commonly prevalent causes of organisational decline and the strategies commonly employed for turnaround by the successful and unsuccessful companies are identified.

The findings of the present study have generated a few useful insights. First, the primary causes for organisational decline are the internal weaknesses of the organisation; in fact the external changes can adversely affect the organisation only if it is internally weak. Second, organisational decline caused by multiple factors (which is usually the case) can be managed effectively by adopting a variety of strategies; hence a single-pronged strategy is often found to be ineffective. Third, the more successful turnarounds had a diverse portfolio of strategies including those of institution-building, often employed in a phased manner, consistent with the stage theories of turnaround.

The limitations of this research arise mainly from the generation of data from published sources and the consequent biases, which can be managed, to a large extent, by using multiple sources for the same case for reducing the publishers’ biases as well as by having multiple raters for identifying the researcher’s biases, if any.

The study has highlighted the need for addressing the internal causes of organisational decline on a priority-basis rather than blaming the external factors, besides pointing to the need for adopting a variety of strategies for dealing with the diversity of causes affecting the organisation’s health, particularly the need for institutionalising the changes. These findings can be of help especially to turnaround managers and policy-makers in dealing with organisational decline and thus contribute to the creation and enhancement of economic value.

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 review the literature from the organizational sciences to develop a grounded narrative of turnaround leadership.

The paper is a review of literature, which employs a ten‐step process to explore and make sense of the turnaround literature from the organizational sciences. The paper relies on strategies appropriate for document analysis, and borrows analytic strategies (e.g. memoing, coding) employed with interview data.

The paper finds three defining themes that flow from the review of empirical and theoretical work on organizational recovery in firms, non‐educational public agencies, and not‐for‐profit organizations: leadership as the critical variable in the turnaround equation; change of leadership as a generally essential element in organizational recovery; and type of leadership, but not style, as important in organizational reintegration work.

The paper posits that the literature on turning around failing organizations in sectors outside of education provides blueprints for recovery activity in failing schools. The implications for turnaround leadership are particularly strong.

This paper is the first systematic effort to mine research in the corporate, not‐for‐profit, and public sectors to develop insights for leadership in failing schools.

The process of business decline can be identified through various warning signals that are concomitant with the decline process. These warning signals are noticed in both the internal and external business environments. The successful turnaround of a failing or declining business requires that management analyze the causes of decline and then implement a strategy for reversal of the decline. This article addresses the signals of decline, internal and external business environments and the strategies for reversal of decline.

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding regarding corporate turnaround. An integrated discussion regarding different corporate failure factors, conditions, symptoms followed by turnaround strategies and its results have been provided.

Authors have done a comprehensive systematic and integrated literature review study of research articles on corporate turnaround. The paper reviewed discussed different dimensions of turnaround management. The authors applied thematic reductionist categorisation with logical arguments to develop an integrated turnaround canvas (ICT).

An ICT has been developed. ICT is a holistic framework to comprehend turnaround strategy. Impact of precondition and turnaround levers on cash flow dynamics and the operational and strategic levers for successful turnaround performance of the firm has also been presented. Authors have also tabulated the entire spectrum of corporate turnaround.

This conceptual work would help researchers interested in turnaround research to anchor their study at different points in ICT canvas. This could be at the decline precondition stage, corporate failure state, turnaround levers (strategic and operational) application phase and in terms of turnaround performance.

The ICT canvas would help managers to identify the set of corporate failure preconditions which might lead their firm to decline phase. The ICT canvas would also help managers based upon the identification of decline preconditions to select an appropriate turnaround interventions required to arrest the corporate failure. Finally, the ICT canvas would help in identifying the operational and strategic levers for successful turnaround implementation and thus achieving the desired corporate performance.

This is one of the first studies to provide an integrated perspective on corporate turnaround as the developed ICT canvas consisted of identification of decline preconditions, corporate failure, turnaround levers (strategic and operational ) and turnaround performance.