Why Great Turnarounds Start with Culture, Not Strategy

Moddy Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard and this is the HBR Idea Cast. Right, Allison, so you are a top thirty US company in terms of size. But your market share is down, your share prices plummeted. and morale is poor. You need to change. What kind of CEO would you want to lead the transformation? Well, I would typically say an outsider for fresh perspectives, new thinking.

I'd probably want someone who's done a big turnaround at another company before. But I did just interview John Stenke of ATT, who oversaw big changes at that company even as an insider. So I'm not sure. Alright, so today it is the outsider story and it's in the same industry. My guest today is Dan Showman, the man who has taken the reins of Verizon, which was in desperate need of a reset. He was not an exec at the company, though he was on the board, and he had led a successful turnaround earlier at PayPal.

But he had no interest in the Verizon job when it was first offered him. Hm. So how's it going? Well, it's still early days. But Schulman decided to focus initially on the company's culture. He's trying to reinvigorate what had become a risk-averse, inward looking organization in order to become competitive again. It has the potential to be a case study of how an outsider can come in to lead the turnaround of a once successful company that has lost its way.

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