A Bankruptcy Lawyer’s Blog

My Review for – Reversing the Slide: A Strategic Guide to Turnarounds and Corporate Renewal

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A just-in-time guide for revamping distressed companies

Drawn from the author’s decades of experience advising, purchasing, and reviving distressed companies across industries, geographies, and sizes, Reversing the Slide is designed to help executives, managers, and employees revitalize downtrodden companies. It shows how to: select the tactics appropriate for each stage of distress; understand the use of entrepreneurial concepts; avoid pitfalls common to turnarounds; determine the legal, financial, strategic, and operational steps in the process; discover why the principal of “ready, fire, aim” should guide the decision-making process in situations with time pressure and significant uncertainty; and uncover the secrets of effective leadership and governance.

• Contains step-by-step instructions for helping troubled organizations bounce back with vigor
• Often quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the author is an authority on restructuring and downsizing
• Offers a handbook for implementing a successful corporate turnaround

James Shein’s Reversing the Slide is full of insightful advice on what works, what does not, and why it will prove invaluable to executives, managers, and employees in helping troubled companies before it’s too late.

Review:

Reversing the Slide by James Shein is a very good read for students of corporate turnaround. The book is simple, clearly laid out and easy to understand. The writing is accessible and the material is presented in a manner which facilitates conceptual grasp.

The early chapters outline the basics. Chapter Two goes back to a somewhat dated notion of strategic vs operating actions, a dichotomy which is somewhat challenged for SME turnarounds. However the content is good so the labels matter less.

The book is not geared to an international audience, so many of the examples are better for the US and developed country environments. For example, Chapeter 6 deals with bankruptcy and the US bankruptcy code. This is a context specific section, but can still be valuable to students not from the US who can juxtapose their reality with that of the US.

Chapters 7-9 are quite interesting and a departure from the usual turnaround fare in that they deal with international turnarounds, non profit turnarounds and why you would buy a company to turn it around. I find these very pragmatic inclusions in the book which give it a rounding that advances the field of literature. The focus on non profit turnaround is something which is only just beginning to garner the attention of scholars in this field, so it is a great jumping off point for persons interested in th is area.

I would say the book has great scope to be internationalized. How do you execute a turnaround in an environment which has different, and fewer, legal frameworks to permit workouts etc? Also of interest would be to see how one might execute a turnaround in a public sector environment, since in the developing world state enterprises are common.

For this reason I gave it 4 stars. I do recommend it as a good read and an essential addition to the library of anyone with an interest in corporate turnaround.