Most turnarounds fail. Instead of investing on the announcement, wait 12-24 months for early evidence in leading KPIs before they hit the bottom line. This improves your odds, as turnarounds that start working rarely revert. The probability gain is worth more than the initial upside you miss.

In a turnaround, a leader's most critical first step is restructuring their direct reports. McLaren's CEO replaced every key leader—CFO, HR, commercial, etc.—to create a unified group that could then drive cultural change down through their own departments.

To combat complacency, Supercell's CEO opened an all-hands meeting by showing an animated slide of their declining global ranking year-by-year. This act of transparent and painful self-critique from the top created the psychological safety and urgency needed to rally the team around a new strategy.

When you're hired into a leadership role, it's because the company needs something fixed. Conduct a "listening tour" specifically to understand the underlying issues. This reveals your true mandate, which is often a need for more innovation and faster speed to market.

Legacy companies often rely on vanity metrics that mask real problems like declining customer satisfaction. The first step in a turnaround is to force leaders to confront external truths and collectively build a new, customer-centric vision.

When assessing a company in crisis, look past the immediate mess to see if the 'bones are good'—meaning the core science or asset is sound. A strong foundation allows for a successful rebuild, regardless of surface-level chaos.

Companies typically promote CEOs from within. An external hire implies a crisis or a failure of succession planning. Therefore, an incoming external CEO has a mandate for significant change. Playing it safe with incremental adjustments squanders the opportunity and fails to address underlying issues.

Despite recent operational struggles and a stock price cut in half, Nomad Foods ($NOMD) co-founder Noam Gottesman recently made a large open-market share purchase. This act serves as a powerful insider signal, reinforcing belief that the turnaround plan under the new CEO is viable.

The CEO's journey began with a personal obsession to fix what he saw as a great but poorly-run public company. He even researched a take-private deal as a "hobby" before being contacted for the role. This demonstrates that deep, unsolicited strategic analysis of a public company's flaws can be a direct path to its leadership.