March 25, 2020

RED Team Executives: On Call to Help Now

RED Team Executives: On Call to Help Now

Uncertainty is growing in the US with coronavirus cases mounting. California, Illinois, Michigan, and other states have taken serious actions with shelter-in-place orders, leaving many people wondering how this will impact them personally as well as their companies and the economy as a whole.

At the same time, we’re reflecting on how much there is to be grateful for, including the strong relationships we’ve built over 10+ years with inspiring leaders. These are women and men who focus their careers on running into the burning building – the company in trouble – learning fast, listening, assembling resources, providing fresh and objective insights, developing new plans and actions for survival and ultimately blueprints for a brighter future.

We recently convened a call with some RED Team execs who shared how they are adapting to new ways to work. Many executives shared experiences on the front lines figuring out how to help combat the virus and also help people work smarter and safer:

Read More
March 25, 2020
Philip Schiavoni

Surviving Zero Revenue: Thoughts from a Turnaround CEO

Philip Schiavoni | InterimExecs RED Team
Surviving Zero Revenue: Thoughts from a Turnaround CEO

Surviving a period of zero or near zero revenue is extraordinarily difficult. The fundamental challenge is how to use time and capital purposefully. Most businesses have multiple constituents with diverse and conflicting interests. There is no one correct course of action. What is beneficial to one constituent is likely to be harmful to another.

Consider the following: The shareholders, owners and founders of a business have invested their own capital, have taken risk and have worked hard to create equity value. These owners could be individuals, institutional investors, private equity groups and hedge funds or could be a publicly owned company. They could be US citizens or foreign entities. Should the protection and retention of owner and shareholder value be the primary and controlling objective?

Read More
March 20, 2020

Inspiring Ways Companies are Reacting to Coronavirus

Inspiring Ways Companies are Reacting to Coronavirus

The worldwide outbreak of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is showing that crises tend to bring out the worst—and the best—in people.

Amid frenzied panic buying, supply hoarding, and finger-pointing, we’re also seeing individuals and businesses step up to help others. If the cloud hovering over the economic system has a silver lining, it’s that temporary changes to how companies define their mission statement could become permanent. Instead of focusing only on their bottom line, businesses might emerge from the crisis more focused on the greater good. In fact, many companies are already leading the way and providing inspiration during these uncertain times.

Read More
September 3, 2019

Why Most Change Initiatives Fail. And What to Do About It

Why Most Change Initiatives Fail. And What to Do About It

“Write down a change you would like to make in an organization that you are currently with…or  change in the marketplace. Any kind. It can be a big change, it could be a small change – strategic, tactical, something you want people to start doing, something you want people to stop doing,” says Jeff Leitner as he looks around a room filled with CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and other C-Suite executives at this year’s InterimExecs’ RED Team meeting. He continues “You’re change is absolutely, almost certainly going to fail. It’s not your fault. It has nothing to do with your particular genius – has nothing to do with your insights. Changes fail. They almost always fail.”

Jeff Leitner knows a thing or two about change and innovation. He spent the last 20 years improving organizations from the US State Department to NASA, Starbucks, Panera, and the Dalai Lama Center for Peace. In a world where innovation and disruption is key, the question is why does change rarely stick in organizations, markets, and society? Jeff has dedicated years to studying why change fails and in his most recent speaking circuit, is sharing what leaders can do to be more effective in leading change initiatives.

Read More

April 25, 2019

Remove the Monopolies and Step Toward Innovation

Remove the Monopolies and Step Toward Innovation

The great thing about playing the board game Monopoly as a kid was that you could buy up everything, collect rents all over the place (or get slaughtered if say your older sister was just a better player) but when the game ended, it was over.

We’re now living a real life monopoly game that’s crept up on even the strongest free markets.

In 2017, 75% of the beer market was cornered by three monopoly companies and one, Anheuser-Busch, held more than 40% alone. In the online search industry, one company monopolized the market and held 91% of market share and 98% of the cell phone market is concentrated among the four largest companies, with 70% being split between Verizon and AT&T alone. Even seemingly trivial things like peanut butter, coffins, and adult websites are all controlled by only a couple of firms.

Read More

April 4, 2019

The Healthcare Industry Leverages Interim Executives To Navigate Disruption

The Healthcare Industry Leverages Interim Executives To Navigate Disruption

Modern healthcare is as complex as physiology inside our own bodies. The healthcare industry is now waist deep in an era of extreme disruption. The breakneck pace of technological innovation coupled with the increasing aging population and chronic diseases is a recipe for historic changes in healthcare.

In the healthcare ecosystem, some organizations will sink, and some swim as disruption occurs. From hospitals to clinics, to patients to pharmaceutical companies, to insurers to medical technology businesses no entity will be unaffected.

Leaders in healthcare say legacy providers must respond swiftly to the changes. The abrupt exit of critical leadership, gaps in capacity and expertise, or old systems that no longer work can quickly become problems. Because these factors are interwoven, health care organizations can find themselves unraveling if they don’t act fast.

Read More

January 11, 2019

Poor System Integration & Company Culture Misalignment Leads to M&A Failure

Poor System Integration & Company Culture Misalignment Leads to M&A Failure

In a merger or acquisition, discord of company cultures and disparate systems can cause the demise of a once-promising partnership. About 70% of acquisitions fail when post-acquisition results don’t meet pre-closing expectations. Many of these M&A failures are caused by poorly executed integration.

What’s surprising is that M&A failures are avoidable with careful integration planning and strategic post merger integration. Pre-acquisition, it takes a lot of forethought on how company cultures might clash and how their systems will integrate. Post-acquisition, it takes a ton of strategic elbow grease to rapidly align systems (and eliminate some), retain productive employees, keep customers, and make stakeholders happy.

Read More

July 23, 2018
Olivia Wagner

Signs Your Struggling Business Needs Help

Olivia Wagner | President, InterimExecs
Signs Your Struggling Business Needs Help

We were having a conversation with an executive recently who shared about their experience parachuting into a business that was struggling with operational inefficiencies.

This executive, like many interims, kicked off the assignment by meeting face-to-face with the management team and employees to learn how the business functions, what’s working, and what isn’t. Their findings would turn into an operational roadmap of the business, where they would set out and implement a go-forward plan. When meeting with one team member and learning about what they did, the executive pointed to a process they had in place asking “why do you do that?”

 The answer: “Because we’ve always done it that way”

 (Alarm bells begin to loudly ring)

Read More

June 29, 2018

How Turning Around a Company Looks Different Today

How Turning Around a Company Looks Different Today

Turnarounds aren’t what they used to be.

Like a good spy movie, turnarounds used to center around a strong central figure making things happen. Turnaround stars and distress experts were born, like Stephen Cooper of Enron and Krispy Kreme fame.

In 1985 the Turnaround Management Association started as a conference of company turnaround specialists in Chapel Hill, ultimately creating a rigorous formal program and exam for Certified Turnaround Professionals.

“Back then the time frame for turnarounds was long,” Richard Lindenmuth, an executive who has completed 23 turnarounds over the years said. “There was bridge financing from banks that would facilitate a turnaround and bankruptcy was really used as a tool for restructuring a company.”

Times have changed. Many of the Fortune 500 companies from those days have merged or disappeared due to outdated technology, products, or services (think RCA, Blackberry, Zenith). At the same time, the way to turn around a struggling business has transformed, being driven by several factors:

Read More

June 28, 2018
Robert Jordan

Latin Got Interim Right 2,000 Years Ago

Robert Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs
Latin Got Interim Right 2,000 Years Ago

My daughter eagerly accepted an internship at the morgue. Wait – how does she put it? The medical examiner’s office. Regardless, all I hear is morgue. Anyway, let’s move past the whole your-daughter-is-around-dead-people issue because here’s the interesting thing. They ask their interns to sign a statement agreeing to work pro re nata.

This was a new phrase for me: pro re nata. It is latin for “in the circumstances” or “as needed” or “as the situation arises.”

I believe the phrase is really a guiding light for the best interim execs around the world, because the best leaders operate as needs demand – pro re nata.

Read More