One of the demonetization benefits, in some markets like used cars, is that organized, transparent businesses are gaining at the cost of unorganized players.
If you have six corporate centres, six treasuries, six of everything, and then if you bring it down to one of everything, obviously there are some savings.
I think there's a lot of things that need to be changed in the business.
You look at what happened with Chrysler, it went through that bankruptcy, and it's re-emerged in a much different fashion, privately held in some of those things, and it's really putting out a great product.
When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.
I am proud of the fact that the U.K. is an open trading country. I welcome inward investment such as that of Nissan, and the takeover of struggling British companies by foreign companies who turn them around, as in the case of Jaguar Land Rover. I also accept that job losses sometimes have to occur to restore failing companies to health.
The real underlying value comes if you can put a company back into a running state and it becomes a successful viable entity if it continues to repay loans.
After Cadbury, the candy company, separated from Dr. Pepper, the soft drinks maker, Cadbury was able to substantially lower its debt load. The profits of Cadbury, the candy company, zoomed.
In 2003, Travelex acquired Thomas Cook Financial Services. We only had use of the Thomas Cook name for five years, so I had to increase public awareness of Travelex to migrate all Cook operations over to it. It was a success.
In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.
I wish the company and its associates all the best as Sears Holdings continues on its transformation.
Succession planning has been a major priority at Southwest for quite some time. We think we have come up with a winning combination of talent for our company reorganization.
The government seems to be set on bankrupting Proton and selling it off, because I think it is regarded as my baby.
We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.
In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.
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.
I came back to Philips and quickly realised that the TV business had a major performance issue and some structural challenges. Rather than try to tweak it and sit things out, we said we had to go for a structural solution.
Telco is totally committed to commercial vehicles, where it is bound to remain a major player. What may well happen in the future is we may split the company into two business units.
Morale is a little bit dimmed, is a bit affected by the redundancy program. That program had been planned for quite some time, and when I took over it was really left to me to make the final decision and it clearly was the right thing to do for the business.
Our global structuring activities and restructuring activities really don't impact India.
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.
With liberalisation, Indian industry gained international exposure because of which it became imperative for companies to rework their strategies to become globally competitive.
At the end of the day, the Irvine Co. is slowly being transformed. Our long-term goal is to transform what was once an agricultural company to a development company, and to that, the next, final step is to create a large real estate investment company.
Sun Pharma's relationship with AML is on an arm's-length basis. As investors have expressed concerns regarding this arrangement, we are in the process of evaluating various options for undertaking domestic formulation business.
The IBC is a very deep reform. It is almost as deep a reform as GST or demonetisation. It changes the fundamental character of Indian business.
