What does history teach us about this?<p>I was part of a company that went down this path. It’s surreal in some ways. A company that was one positioned for “world domination” is suddenly in a “chaotic confused” state.<p>Some situations I had to go through as an employee:<p>Press is never good.<p>Human capital starts hemorrhaging<p>Leading to buggy product sand releases. Quality drops dramatically. Customer service to bugs to lunches.<p>Cafeteria conversations are never positive.<p>You start to see hopes fade despite the salaries.<p>Everything management communicates will seem like a lie.<p>There is a lot of “strategically realigning” corporate talk<p>From recent times:<p>Marissa Mayer taking over Yahoo<p>Don Mattrick taking over Zynga<p>X going to take over Microsoft<p>Y to take over BlackBerry<p>Sony….<p>If I remember, pg talked about acquisitions as a way to jump out of the spiral.<p>What are the other strategies that you have seen?
Hmm...your examples are dissimilar: Yahoo and Microsoft have very different challenges than Blackberry or Nokia (they're in a much better position), and I'd put Zynga in a third category.<p>That said: some notorious companies have executed big turnarounds from near-death to leading.<p>The most notorious is of course Apple :) .<p>In the tech sector we've witnessed the reinvention of IBM (from mainframes to services), mostly copied by HP.<p>Some articles:<p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-ten-biggest-corporate-turnarounds-2011-02-03" rel="nofollow">http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-ten-biggest-corpor...</a><p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/</a>