Innovation and Growth in Corporate Restructurings

Organizational decline and corporate turnarounds are historically at the height of interest, both theoretically as well as with regard to current practice. Characterized as the opposite of successful adaptation, organizational decline is the failure to anticipate, avoid, neutralize, and adapt to external or internal pressures, thus triggering a process of decreasing organizational resources over a specific period of time that might, but not necessarily needs to, end in corporate failure. Turnaround management is intuitively related to efficiency seeking, co- cutting, streamlining processes, simplifying structures, etc. , etc. The questioning of a simple, one-sided view of cost management and short-term survival is already a challenging task. To associate exploitation and exploration with a successful long-term-oriented turnaround and to empirically search for it in the turnaround world is a truly exceptional endeavor, an interesting topic as such, and a creative and exciting perspective. Achim Schmitt does not only have personal experience with restructuring, but he has for many years done very interesting research into the field of corporate restructuring and behavior in respect of organizational decline. His dissertation project analyzed organizations’ reactions to situations of organizational decline. The results of his work revealed how organizations manage to avoid bankruptcy, while simultaneously achieving sustainable growth for corporate survival. Besides providing insights into how restructurings are carried out in practice, the strength of this book lies in the integration of multiple research streams and the results of a larger empirical study.