Chanda Kochhar Quotes

There are limits to what reorganization and reform can do.

Lot of companies are looking for advisory work on business strategy, restructuring work.

Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.

I think there are several departments we could completely get rid of, and we wouldn't miss it.

I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons.

Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

In a period of economic downturn, the overwhelming instinct is to pare back, cut costs, and lay off. If you do that, do so with your strategy in mind. The worst mistake is to cut across the board. Instead, reconnect and recommit to a clear strategy that will distinguish yourself from others.

We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.

I cleaned up everything behind the scenes and simplified my life. I made some changes in my staff. I changed management, my accountants, my bookkeeping team. I had a full refresh. For me that was extremely important.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

So in 2000, when we changed the business model and started really focusing on that triangle and putting the customer in the center, we decided we should hold off - we've done enough consolidation; we've got enough critical mass.

When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

Ford, as I understand it, had done away with the concept of regional management, and now they've re-introduced that in Europe, so it's kind of a two-way street.

We like the size of the company today given the environment and have no plans to split it up and make it smaller.

Our entire team is focused on managing this company for value - fixing or eliminating those operations that lessen value and expanding or adding those that enhance value.

You know, in a workplace, when you shrink the size of a workforce, there is pain there. But there is no question: we have a government that we can no longer afford. That is the cold, hard fact. So we have to make this more efficient. We have to sunset programs that no longer work. We have to eliminate waste and fraud. We must do this.

To be successful in business, you have to be ruthless.

By 2002, I realized that what was classically called a rollup strategy was not generally effective, at least not for me.

You can't delegate turning a company around.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

While 2015 was challenging, we implemented many strategic and operational initiatives to improve our business and better position J.Crew for the future.