| KELLOGG INITIATIVES: Markets and Customers |
‘RESURGENCE’ GREGORY CARPENTER’S NEW BOOK EXAMINES HOW COMPANIES CAN REINVENT THEMSELVES BY EMBRACING A CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL MORGENSTERN
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The turnaround story occupies a special place in executives’ hearts. When a company that’s been written off as dead returns to profitability, other business leaders clamor to look behind the curtain — in part to get insight should they find themselves in a similar position. Often, a charismatic leader or breakthrough innovation is hailed as the secret ingredient in corporate transformation. But recent work from Gregory Carpenter, the James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing Strategy, shows the prevailing wisdom is mostly a myth. Carpenter and his co-authors, former Kellogg professor John Sherry Jr. and Gary Gebhardt ’05, associate professor of marketing at HEC Montréal (École des Hautes Études commerciales de Montréal), spent more than a decade studying companies trying to reinvent themselves. Their book, Resurgence: The Four Stages of Market-Focused Reinvention (Palgrave Macmillan, February 2014), provides an in-depth look at seven companies — among them iconic corporations such as HarleyDavidson and Motorola — and how they reinvented themselves with a market focus. All of the firms took similar actions, including reorganizing and adding new people and incentives. Despite taking the same actions, some failed while others succeeded. What made the difference? “Rather than leadership being the key, all the
KELLOGG SPRING/SUMMER 2014