This Turnaround Management course is about rehabilitating distressed companies. The course examines turnaround business situations, i.e., established firms experiencing operational, financial and managerial difficulties. It emphasizes the operating manager’s perspective and considers strategy issues as well as financial ones. (In some sessions the creditor’s viewpoint is of critical importance as it affects managerial autonomy.)

Turnaround Management integrates the functional disciplines of the core curriculum: that means that a basic understanding of accounting and corporate finance is mandato-ry to do the class exercises which look at cash flows projections, debt restructuring and liquidation analysis. Use your core finance class to value a firm’s equity if you want to exchange its debt for more equity. The Final Project requires the general manager’s perspective to suggest operating changes as well as use of qualitative and quantitative tools to effect solutions. After all, without viable demand for products, the firm is dead.

Kathryn Harrigan

Henry R. Kravis Professor of Business Leadership

Professor Harrigan, who teaches strategic management courses about corporate growth (as well as turnaround management), is a specialist in corporate strategy, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, diversification strategy, in turnarounds, industry restructurings and the competitive problems of mature- and declining-demand businesses, and in industry and competitor analysis. Most recently, Professor Harrigan has researched the role of technological synergies in corporate strategy. She has served...

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