How to Turn Things Around

"Reset

By Dan Heath

Avid Reader, 288 pages, $32

Is bringing an outside turnaround expert into a struggling organization as crazy as bringing a therapist to live with you in the hope of fixing your marriage? Yes, says Dan Heath in "Reset: How to Change What's Not Working." Yet he's still in favor of organizations doing just that.

He says it works, that nearly bankrupt businesses can go "from life support to basic health -- in a matter of months." And not only in the private sector; even some government problems might be solved this way, a timely observation considering the recent creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk.

How are such turnarounds done? Mr. Heath builds his answer around the simple analogy that many business problems are like boulders blocking your path: Pushing harder won't work on its own -- you need to first identify points of leverage, and then "restack" resources there.

It sounds simple enough, yet finding those points of leverage where small efforts yield big results is anything but.

The first step, Mr. Heath tells us, involves following the advice of Nelson Repenning, an MIT professor who studies system dynamics: you must "go and see the work." If you're a factory owner, spend time on the job with frontline workers. If you're a principal, walk the halls and shadow students. And if you're Mr. Musk, spend time with the workers of whatever government agency you're fixing. Instead of sitting in conference rooms dueling with ideas, a reset requires replacing conjecture with real experience.

Executives always end up being surprised, even embarrassed, at what they find, Mr. Heath says. One vice president of sales calculated that he spent 18 hours every week on forecasting calls instead of on driving sales. Another executive discovered a team member who spent hours producing high-definition color prints of files and then organizing them in cabinets, even though "there was a digital repository that auto-archived these files." She simply hadn't been told.

Waste like that can simply be eliminated. Technology can help: In Asheboro, N.C., bulk-trash trucks would drive up and down every street looking for large discarded items, significantly running up the city's fuel budget. The city's information-technology team enabled the regular trash collectors to instead report the GPS coordinates of bulky items so the large-item trucks could drive directly to them, saving thousands of taxpayer dollars.

These are the "easy" wins. It inevitably gets more difficult because usually there isn't enough easily discoverable waste. Therefore, Mr. Heath writes, "we shouldn't think AND, we should think INSTEAD OF" (his emphasis). This means the turnaround team needs next to calculate what people, or departments, need to be productively cut or repurposed.

Planners need to move away from the frontlines and zoom out, mapping the entire organization. Individuals are unlikely to admit (or even to be aware) that what they or their departments are doing isn't valuable enough to the organization from a big-picture perspective. And they're certainly not incentivized to find out.

A good way to get an overarching view is to follow a customer's entire journey to understand their experience, but the planners must be very clear about the organization's goal -- to really get it right, they must ask, "What's the goal of the goal?"

Mr. Heath offers an amusing example from Rory Sutherland, a British advertising executive. After the Eurostar shaved 20 minutes off the London to Paris commute, at a cost of roughly GBP6 billion, Mr. Sutherland pointed out that while the stated goal was speeding up the route, the goal of the goal was to improve the passenger experience. This, he said, could have been done better by spending about 10% of that budget on hiring male and female models to walk up and down the trains serving glasses of Bordeaux. "You'd still have five billion pounds in change," he said, "and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down."

Books in this genre often focus on a single area for companies or leaders to focus on and improve. Mr. Heath builds his book on lots of such ideas and case studies, fitting them into a step-by-step turnaround approach. This means he covers a lot briefly, but he helpfully points in each chapter to further reading for those wanting a deeper dive.

For all the examples Mr. Heath offers, including from well-known companies ranging from T-Mobile to Chick-Fil-A, what's notable is that they're primarily stories of individuals and departments -- that is, they're ultimately local. His examples -- at least as far as we know from the book -- don't then inspire company-wide transformations. Government examples are similarly localized and agency-specific. Perhaps leaders aren't interested in the pain of such a turnaround, or internal politics and fiefdoms get in the way. Perhaps complete institutional turnarounds are just too hard. Perhaps they're under way somewhere. Or it could be that they're just waiting for someone with the right experience, mindset and, critically, determination. We'll see if Mr. Musk is that person for the federal government.

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Mr. Freedman is the managing partner of NavT1 and the co-author of "The Black Banners."” [1]

 

 1. How to Turn Things Around. Freedman, Daniel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Feb 2025: A13.