Corporate Restructuring Quotes

Over the next few years the boardrooms of America are going to light up with hot flashes.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments... but also their companies.

The strategic plan to transform Valeant smartly focuses on rebuilding the company's core franchises in ophthalmology, dermatology, and gastroenterology while simultaneously using the proceeds from the sale of non-core assets and operating cash flow to de-lever the company.

If they are too big to fail, make them smaller.

I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.

Towards the end of 2005, Ineos acquired Innovene, the petrochemicals arm of BP, for $9 billion. It quadrupled the size of Ineos overnight and brought with it some of the world's largest industrial sites.

Ford had a number of different strategies over the years that they thought obviously made sense at the time, just like all the different brands, and also the regional operations.

1971 … was the year when, for the very first time, the United States bailed out an industrial firm whose own financial management had driven it to the brink of extinction. The company was Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and the bailout was in the form of a loan guarantee worth $250 million.

The most encouraging thing is that with the management changes there have been at Renault, they are very open to accepting that there are issues and they need to improve.

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

In 1978, we adopted a new Bankruptcy Code in the United States, and a principal part of this was designed to adjust to the new corporation, to find ways to let a corporation that had gotten into financial trouble reorganize itself. A big part of the selling point on this bankruptcy law was, 'It will preserve jobs.'

When I came into the CEO office, I basically changed the entire management team. We knew that we had to change the company, so we needed a new set of leaders.

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.

I managed Hewlett Packard through the worst technology downturn in 25 years, the dotcom bust.

In the highly unlikely event that the 'Telegraph' was to be sold again, then 'The Spectator' doesn't go with it.

The corporate killer downsizing is directly responsive to what the mutual funds have wanted.

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.

Size is the enemy of excellence in investment banking, particularly when you are trying to put together two different cultures.

There are lots of businesses that are well in excess of $9 billion that have gone into bankruptcy, that have been mismanaged. And that has not served anyone very well.

Why are CEO's who slash jobs so proud of themselves? Instead of bragging about 'cutting fat,' they ought to be getting up before their employees and saying, We did such a lousy job of planning and hiring that we have more people than work. And we are so broke and so dim-witted that we can't come up with any way to get more work. So our only solution is to send a lot of good people home. I am ashamed and I am sorry.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.