The CEO Turnaround Series: 5 Case Studies in Triage, Sequencing, and Execution

Triage Tames. Tinkering Topples.

When a company is in the red zone — declining revenue, eroding margins, anxious board, restless investors — the sequence of CEO actions determines whether the company survives or joins the long list of corporate carcasses littering business school curricula. The conventional turnaround playbook is wrong on the sequence. It prescribes cost cutting first, strategic refocus second, growth investment third, and cultural change last. The sequence is wrong because cost cutting without strategic refocus damages the wrong cost categories, strategic refocus without cultural change cannot be executed, and growth investment without an honest read of the existing portfolio just funds the same losses with more capital. The successful turnarounds of the past two decades have followed a different sequence — triage first, strategic clarification second, cultural intervention third, growth investment fourth — and the operators who got the sequence right produced legacies. The operators who got it wrong produced cautionary tales. The five episodes in this series audit the most studied turnaround executions of recent memory: Hubert Joly at Best Buy, Brian Cornell at Target, Kazuo Hirai at Sony, Doug Conant at Campbell Soup, and Angela Ahrendts at Burberry. Each turnaround illustrates a different sequencing decision, a different triage methodology, and a different execution challenge. Listen to all five and you will have the operating manual for the moment your own organization enters the red zone.

Table of Contents

• 1. Hubert Joly: The Best Buy Turnaround Decoded
• 2. Brian Cornell: Target’s Turnaround Triage
• 3. Kazuo Hirai: Sony’s Unfinished Turnaround
• 4. Doug Conant: The Campbell Soup Turnaround Audit
• 5. Angela Ahrendts: The Burberry Turnaround Sequencing
• The Sequencing Discipline
• Frequently Asked Questions

The First 90 Days That Define the Next Five Years

A board chair I worked with last year inherited a CEO transition during a genuine crisis. Revenue down 11%. EBITDA down 34%. Top three customers all making competitive evaluations simultaneously. The previous CEO had been running a five-year transformation that had produced expensive activity and zero measurable improvement.

The new CEO had ninety days to demonstrate signal. The wrong sequence in the first ninety days would have lost the company another two years of decline before recovery was possible. The right sequence — and the right sequence is not obvious in advance — could establish the conditions for genuine turnaround within twelve months.

The board chair asked me which historical turnaround playbook applied to his situation. The honest answer was: parts of five different ones. The right turnaround sequence is not generic. It is specific to the diagnostic, the time pressure, the capital position, and the political reality of the executive team. The five episodes below provide the comparative case material.

1. Hubert Joly: The Best Buy Turnaround Decoded

Hubert Joly: The Best Buy Turnaround Decoded opens the series with one of the most studied retail turnarounds of the past fifteen years.

Joly inherited Best Buy in 2012 with the company being widely written off as the next Circuit City. Showrooming was killing the format. Amazon was eating margin. Wall Street had effectively pronounced the company dead. Joly’s response — Renew Blue — became the textbook case for the modern retail turnaround.

According to analysis from Forbes on the Best Buy execution, the Joly playbook prioritized employee re-engagement and price-match commitments before structural cost reduction, which inverted the conventional turnaround sequence and produced results that surprised most observers. Joly bet that the company’s existing assets — store footprint, employee base, vendor relationships — were under-monetized rather than over-built. The bet was correct. The company tripled its stock price.

The episode walks through the four-phase execution sequence, the three structural decisions that distinguished Joly’s approach from the conventional playbook, and the lessons that translate to operators facing analogous existential threats. The Best Buy case is required reading for any leader confronting a “category obsolescence” diagnosis.

2. Brian Cornell: Target’s Turnaround Triage

Brian Cornell: Target’s Turnaround Triage examines a different kind of turnaround — the recovery from a self-inflicted wound rather than from an externally-driven crisis.

Cornell took Target in 2014 after the Canadian expansion failure had cost the company billions and damaged executive credibility. The Target situation was not category obsolescence. It was strategic confusion compounded by execution failure. The triage required surgical precision: which initiatives to kill immediately, which to preserve at reduced scale, and which to actually accelerate.

The episode walks through Cornell’s first-90-day sequencing — the Canadian wind-down, the small-format rollout, the digital investment — and the three principles that guided the triage. The wrong cuts in a turnaround do more damage than the original problem. Cornell’s discipline in distinguishing strategic problems from execution problems is the most replicable element of the playbook.

3. Kazuo Hirai: Sony’s Unfinished Turnaround

Kazuo Hirai: Sony’s Unfinished Turnaround is the most complicated case in the series. Hirai’s tenure at Sony produced genuine progress and never quite produced full recovery, and the diagnostic of why it stopped short is more valuable than the analysis of cleaner success cases.

Sony was a portfolio company facing simultaneous decline across multiple business units — TVs, mobile, music, film, gaming — each of which required different strategic responses operating on different timelines. Hirai’s central decision — to preserve the conglomerate structure while restructuring inside each business — was structurally defensible and operationally exhausting. The execution succeeded in some units (PlayStation, music) and stalled in others (mobile, TVs).

The unfinished turnaround is more instructive than the finished one because it shows where the methodology breaks. The episode walks through the three structural decisions that worked, the two structural decisions that did not, and the political constraints that prevented Hirai from completing the work he started. Modern operators facing portfolio turnarounds have more to learn from the Sony case than from cleaner success stories.

4. Doug Conant: The Campbell Soup Turnaround Audit

Doug Conant: The Campbell Soup Turnaround Audit covers the most underappreciated turnaround of the early 2000s.

Conant inherited Campbell Soup in 2001 with declining brand relevance, eroding shelf space, and a culturally exhausted organization. The situation did not look like a crisis on the financials. It looked like slow death, which is the most dangerous turnaround context because the urgency required for transformation is harder to manufacture when the income statement is not screaming.

Conant’s response — a culture-first turnaround anchored in employee engagement, product innovation, and disciplined capital allocation — produced ten years of outperformance and laid the groundwork for the next decade of brand recovery. The episode walks through the cultural intervention work, the product portfolio decisions, and the acquisition strategy that supported the turnaround. The Campbell Soup case is the reference case for “slow-death” turnaround sequencing.

5. Angela Ahrendts: The Burberry Turnaround Sequencing

The series closes with Angela Ahrendts: The Burberry Turnaround Sequencing, which examines a turnaround that combined elements of all four prior cases — brand revitalization, digital transformation, organizational restructuring, and cultural intervention — executed in a single coherent sequence.

Ahrendts inherited Burberry in 2006 with a brand that had been progressively diluted through over-licensing and inconsistent positioning. The recovery required simultaneous work on the product, the brand architecture, the retail footprint, and the digital platform — and the order in which the work was sequenced determined whether the elements would reinforce or undermine each other.

The Ahrendts playbook is the modern reference for luxury and aspirational-brand turnarounds:

• The brand work had to lead
• The product work had to follow within twelve months
• The digital work had to be running in parallel from day one

The episode walks through the sequencing decisions and explains why the same elements deployed in a different order would have failed.

The Sequencing Discipline

These five episodes converge on a single discipline: turnaround sequencing as the single most consequential decision a CEO makes during a crisis. The strategic content matters. The execution matters. The team matters. And the sequence in which the strategic, execution, and team work get deployed matters more than any of them individually.

Most failed turnarounds were not sabotaged by bad strategy or weak execution. They were sabotaged by the wrong sequence — by cost cutting that preceded strategic clarity, by growth investment that preceded portfolio rationalization, by cultural intervention that preceded operational stabilization. The right components in the wrong order produce the same result as the wrong components in the right order: failed transformation.

The five turnarounds above represent five different sequencing answers to five different diagnostic situations. No single playbook applies to all crises. The discipline is to read the diagnostic correctly, identify the analogous historical case, and adapt the sequence to the specific situation rather than imposing a generic methodology.

If you find yourself approaching a turnaround moment — your own organization or a board you sit on — listen to all five. The sequence you choose in the first ninety days will define the next five years. The episodes are the comparative reference. The decision is yours to make, and yours to live with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the conventional turnaround sequence and why is it wrong?

The conventional playbook prescribes cost cutting first, strategic refocus second, growth investment third, and cultural change last. The sequence is structurally wrong because cost cutting without strategic clarity damages the wrong cost categories, strategic refocus without cultural change cannot be executed, and growth investment without an honest portfolio audit just funds existing losses with more capital. Successful modern turnarounds have followed a different sequence: triage first, strategic clarification second, cultural intervention third, growth investment fourth.

How did Hubert Joly turn around Best Buy?

Joly’s Renew Blue playbook inverted the conventional retail turnaround sequence by prioritizing employee re-engagement and price-match commitments before structural cost reduction. The bet was that Best Buy’s existing assets — store footprint, employee base, vendor relationships — were under-monetized rather than over-built. The bet was correct. The company tripled its stock price during his tenure and became the reference case for retail turnarounds against existential category threats like Amazon.

What made Brian Cornell’s Target turnaround different?

The Target situation was not category obsolescence — it was strategic confusion compounded by execution failure following the catastrophic Canadian expansion. Cornell’s discipline in distinguishing strategic problems from execution problems is the most replicable element of the playbook. The triage required surgical precision: which initiatives to kill immediately (Canada), which to preserve at reduced scale, and which to actively accelerate (small-format stores, digital investment). The wrong cuts during a turnaround often do more damage than the original problem.

Why is Kazuo Hirai’s Sony turnaround called “unfinished”?

Hirai produced genuine progress at Sony but never achieved full recovery. The PlayStation and music units recovered fully. Mobile and TVs stalled. The central decision — to preserve the conglomerate structure while restructuring inside each business unit — was structurally defensible but operationally exhausting and politically constrained. The unfinished turnaround is more instructive than cleaner success cases because it shows where the methodology breaks down. Modern operators facing multi-business-unit portfolio turnarounds have more to learn from Sony than from single-business success stories.

What is a “slow-death” turnaround and why is it more dangerous?

A slow-death turnaround is one in which the financials do not yet show crisis-level damage, but the underlying business is in metabolic decline that will surface on the income statement within three to five years. Doug Conant’s Campbell Soup turnaround in 2001 is the reference case. Slow-death situations are more dangerous than acute crises because the urgency required for transformation is harder to manufacture when the income statement is not screaming. Boards and executive teams resist intervention until the damage is severe enough to be politically obvious — by which point the corrective cost has multiplied.

What was distinctive about Angela Ahrendts’ Burberry turnaround?

Ahrendts executed brand revitalization, digital transformation, organizational restructuring, and cultural intervention as a single coherent sequence rather than as separate workstreams. The brand work led, the product work followed within twelve months, and the digital work ran in parallel from day one. The sequencing was the differentiator — the same elements deployed in a different order would have failed because the work would have undermined itself rather than reinforcing across categories. The Ahrendts playbook remains the modern reference for luxury and aspirational-brand turnarounds.

Why is sequencing more important than strategy in a turnaround?

The right components deployed in the wrong order produce the same result as the wrong components deployed in the right order: failed transformation. Most failed turnarounds were not sabotaged by bad strategy or weak execution but by sequence errors — cost cutting that preceded strategic clarity, growth investment that preceded portfolio rationalization, cultural intervention that preceded operational stabilization. The CEO’s most consequential turnaround decision is the order in which the strategic, execution, and team work gets deployed.

How does a CEO know which historical turnaround playbook applies to their situation?

No single playbook applies to all crises. The five turnarounds in this series represent five distinct diagnostic patterns: category obsolescence (Joly/Best Buy), self-inflicted strategic confusion (Cornell/Target), portfolio decline across multiple business units (Hirai/Sony), slow-death cultural exhaustion (Conant/Campbell), and brand dilution requiring multi-vector recovery (Ahrendts/Burberry). The discipline is to read the diagnostic correctly, identify the most analogous historical case, and adapt the sequence to the specific situation rather than imposing a generic methodology drawn from consulting decks.

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Todd Hagopian is the founder of Stagnation Assassins, author of The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox, and founder of the Stagnation Intelligence Agency. He has transformed businesses at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool Corporation, and JBT Marel, generating over $2 billion in shareholder value. His methodologies have been published on SSRN and featured in Forbes, Fox Business, The Washington Post, and NPR. Connect with Todd on LinkedIn or Twitter.