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This case presents turnaround alternatives for a UK-based company, Carpets International (CI), a manufacturer focused on woven carpets and suffering from the ageing equipment and resulting product quality issues during the late 1990s. The case profiles CI’s position in the UK marketplace as well as highlights the growing international competition from Europe and Mexico. Comparisons between customer’s preferences for carpeting in the USA vs the UK are included. Additionally, the case introduces first-mover advantages in the application of innovational ideas applied to a mature industry in another country.

This case study was written by the CEO of the company as the lead author. The case is not disguised.

This case is appropriate for undergraduate strategic management/business policy classes.

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.

Symbols can effectively serve as triggers for cognitive and behavioral change. However, little is known about the use of symbolism in organizational change efforts. Therefore, this study, utilizing a national survey of turnaround change agents (TCAs), investigated their use of verbal, enacted, and material symbols during business turnarounds. Conclusions are drawn concerning the metaphors used to describe the context of the business turnaround and TCAs' usage and rated effectiveness of symbols. It is suggested that multiple symbolism practices should be included in organizational diagnoses.

This paper presents the findings of a study of fill rate, time, and delivery costs for international document delivery from the Iowa State University Library to libraries and scholars in several developing countries. The overall results included a 73 per cent fill rate and a total turnaround time of 16.3 days. Per page fax charges were almost 12 times as expensive as air mail costs. International document delivery programmes will need to have the ability to handle a variety of communication methods. In addition, these libraries will need to examine several philosophical issues arising from interlibrary co‐operation with partners in developing countries as they determine their place in the complex economic, political and organisational structures related to international document supply.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the effect of top management team (TMT) characteristics on corporate turnaround performance in declining firms under conditions of environmental stability and turbulence.

Theoretical hypotheses were developed and tested using data collected from 98 US manufacturing firms that experienced performance decline and turnaround during the periods 1990‐1994 and 1995‐2000 respectively. Data were collected from the COMPUSTAT database and annual filings and analyzed using a moderated regression analysis.

The results of moderated regression analysis indicate an adverse effect of long organizational tenure on corporate turnaround, especially in turbulent environments. Hence, if was found that the effect of top team composition on corporate turnaround varies depending on the environmental context.

The study contributes to the ongoing corporate turnaround research by examining the interplay between TMT characteristics and turnaround performance under different environmental contexts. Consequently, the findings of the study suggest that the environmental context in which declining firms operate matter just as much as the nature and characteristics of their top team in determining the success of their turnaround attempt.

The results of the study shed some light on corporate governance issues, specifically on the importance of matching top management change efforts in declining firms with the respective environmental context.

The study contributes to the corporate turnaround literature by addressing the recent call for research in the TMT‐turnaround relationship under environmental contingencies (i.e. environmental stability/turbulence).

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.

Organisational decline has far-reaching, negative emotional and financial consequences for staff and customers, generating academic and practitioner interest in turnaround change processes. Despite numerous studies to identify the stages during turnarounds, the findings have been inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap by defining these stages, or episodes. The characteristics of leaders affect the outcome of organisational change towards turnarounds. This paper focusses, therefore, on the leadership requirements during specific episodes, from the initial crisis to the full recovery phases.

A total of 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted with executives from the public sector in South Africa who went through or were going through turnaround change processes and 3 with experts consulting to these organisations.

Contrary to current literature in organisational change, this study found that, in these turnaround situations, leadership in the form of either an individual CEO or director general was preferable to shared leadership or leadership distributed throughout the organisation. This study found four critical episodes that occurred during all the public service turnarounds explored, and established that key leadership requirements differ across these episodes. The study shows how these requirements relate to the current literature on transactional, transformational and authentic leadership.

The findings on the leadership requirements ultimately inform the selection and development of leaders tasked with high-risk turnaround change processes.

Four episodes with corresponding leadership requirements were established in the particular context of public sector turnaround change processes.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen the understanding of how minoritized families and communities contribute to equity-focused school change, not as individual consumers or beneficiaries, but as educational and community leaders working collectively to transform their schools.

This qualitative case study examines one poverty-impacted racially diverse high school in the US West and the changes that occurred over a seven-year period.

Minoritized families, community leaders and formal leaders leveraged conventional schooling structures – such as turnaround reforms, the International Baccalaureate program and the PTA – to disrupt the default institutional scripts of schools and drive equity-focused change for all students, particularly African-Americans from the neighborhood.

Though one school, this case contributes insights about how families and communities can collaborate with systems actors to catalyze educational justice in gentrifying communities.

This study suggests strategies that families and communities used to reclaim school narratives, “infiltrate” conventional structures and reorient them toward equitable collaboration and educational justice.

This study contributes to a body of critical scholarship on “turnaround” reform efforts in urban secondary schools and suggests ways to reshape decision making, leadership, parent engagement and student intervention to build collective agency.

This research raises provocative questions about the extent to which families and communities can use conventional structures and policies to pursue educational justice in the US public education. Learning from such efforts highlights strategies and practices that might begin to help us construct more decolonizing theories of change.

Given the increased emphasis on embedding the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) in the curriculum, research, engagement activities and operations of higher education institutions, this comparative study aims to replicate an earlier international study of Turnaround Leadership for Sustainability in Higher Education (TLSHE) in the unique context of Malaysia and Japan. This paper also presents a case for closer focus on developing Education for Sustainability (EfS) leaders in institutions of higher learning.

This study is a quantitative comparative research. The authors collected data for EfS-related variables from lecturers affiliated with Malaysian and Japanese public and private universities. Building on the data and results from the TLSHE study, this study made a series of within- and between-sample descriptive comparisons from different angles and levels. To generalize the findings, this study used gender and experience outside higher education as control variables and compared the academics from the Malaysian and the Japanese institutions through the path modeling framework.

The comparisons showed that except for two domains, namely, contextual factors influencing EfS leadership and the EfS leadership development approaches, the means of all other domains based on the data collected from the Malaysian sample were the highest, followed by means from the international TLSHE sample, and finally the means from the Japanese sample. This study also observed that transparency, engagement with EfS initiatives at different levels, passion for teaching and learning, and creative and lateral thinking were among the top indicators. The inferential tests revealed significant differences between the academics from Japan and Malaysia as well.

The findings of the analyses can be used to ensure that the selection and development of EfS leaders (in this case, lecturers who may be formal or informal EfS leaders), not just at the central but at the local level in the distinctive context of Japan and Malaysia, focus on what counts and the good ideas embodied in the 17 UN SDGs are actually put into practice. This study has also highlighted the policy implications with respect to the gender and the previous work experience of lecturers outside higher education sector in more detail.

This study compares the perceptions of two samples of academics from Asian countries with the perceptions of the international TLSHE sampled EfS leaders in terms of EfS leadership-related issues and therefore, increases the awareness of academic community in this regard. It also highlights the role of lecturers (e.g. professors) as intellectual academic leaders in achieving SDGs. Moreover, this study shows that lecturers’ gender and previous work experience outside higher education should be considered when developing and implementing policies on EfS leadership.

The learning outcomes of this study are as follows: ■ understand organizational turnaround and its sustainability;■ applying the understanding of turnarounds to distinguish between operational and strategic levers of a turnaround strategy; ■ analyze and evaluate past and present turnarounds from a sustainability perspective; and ■ formulate managerial actions to make turnaround sustainable.

Braithwaite Company Ltd. (Braithwaite) was a specialized engineering firm headquartered in Kolkatta, India. It primarily undertook structural steel fabrication to make railway wagons and bridge structures. It was incorporated as a private enterprise almost a century back. However, since its nationalization five decades ago, it has been operating as a public sector undertaking (PSU) under the aegis of Indian Railways, a department of the Government of India. The case documents the past three decades of the firm’s journey, during which it experienced three episodic turnarounds. Details of the first two turnarounds are presented as the background, in light of which sustainability of the third turnaround is to be examined. The case explores the sustainability of organizational turnarounds from the perspective of the current Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), the case protagonist. Braithwaite underwent financial and operational distress in 1992, 2005 and 2015 and negotiated them under different leaders. These leaders from diverse backgrounds used distinct tactics and strategies to bring about organizational turnarounds. The case provides data and information to assess the sustainability of the third turnaround. Hence, it allows a class to explore the paradoxical observation that while “turnaround” inherently implies sustenance of good performance over time, turnaround sustainability is not spontaneous in the real world. The case deals with the performance issues of PSUs, which make significant contributions to the national economy in the case of emerging economies (for example, 5%–8% of the Indian National gross domestic product is contributed by PSUs; https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/psus-are-crucial-for-indias-growth-but-only-if-they-play-a-strategic-role). Under government ownership and management, the poor performance of PSUs is often attributed to bad decision-making by its top management. In contrast, Braithwaite’s top management’s sound contextual decision-making resulted in a jump in its performance during each turnaround phase, but unsound fundamentals resulted in the unsustainability of the turnarounds. Hence, the case enables an exploration of the unique challenges faced by PSU that emanate from legacy roles, monopolistic markets and dual purpose – the concurrent pursuit of profits and social welfare. Consequently, the case allows an examination of the reasons for the distress of PSUs and the viability of turnaround strategies in the context of the broader Business–Government–Society landscape in emerging economies.

The case is written for use in the MBA elective course covering “Strategic Revival and Turnaround Strategies.” It can be used at the beginning of the course to identify reasons for organizational failure/distress or in the later part of the course to discuss the implementation of operational and strategic turnaround strategies.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 10: Public Sector Management.