What does history teach us about this?
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.
Some situations I had to go through as an employee:
Press is never good.
Human capital starts hemorrhaging
Leading to buggy product sand releases. Quality drops dramatically. Customer service to bugs to lunches.
Cafeteria conversations are never positive.
You start to see hopes fade despite the salaries.
Everything management communicates will seem like a lie.
There is a lot of “strategically realigning” corporate talk
From recent times:
Marissa Mayer taking over Yahoo
Don Mattrick taking over Zynga
X going to take over Microsoft
Y to take over BlackBerry
Sony….
If I remember, pg talked about acquisitions as a way to jump out of the spiral.
What are the other strategies that you have seen?
That said: some notorious companies have executed big turnarounds from near-death to leading.
The most notorious is of course Apple :) .
In the tech sector we've witnessed the reinvention of IBM (from mainframes to services), mostly copied by HP.
Some articles:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-ten-biggest-corpor...
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/turnaround/