Waterstones: a bookseller saved by letting shops act like independents
Bought for £53m in 2011 while losing money, Waterstones was back in profit by 2016 after James Daunt let shops choose stock and stopped…
Rolls-Royce: from pandemic rescue to a profit rebuild
After a £4.2bn cash outflow in 2020, Rolls-Royce raised £7.3bn and cut 9,000 jobs; a new chief executive then lifted operating profit to £3.5bn…
HCL Technologies: putting employees first and making managers answer to them
Under Vineet Nayar from 2005, HCL Technologies made managers answer to frontline staff, and its revenue rose about sixfold to some $4.7bn in eight…
Ford: how One Ford avoided a bailout by borrowing early and selling brands
After a record $12.7bn loss in 2006, Ford borrowed $23.5bn against nearly all its US assets, sold its premium brands and came through 2009…
Starbucks: how Howard Schultz came back to reset a business that grew too fast
Howard Schultz took back the chief executive role on 7 January 2008, after shares halved in a year, then closed about 800 US stores…
Domino’s: admitting the pizza was bad and rewriting the recipe
In December 2009 Domino's replaced a 49-year-old recipe and told customers why, and US same-store sales rose 14.3 per cent in the first quarter…
LEGO: how a toymaker losing $1m a day became the world’s biggest
LEGO lost almost $1 million a day in 2003 and carried debt near $800 million, then cut its range, sold its parks and by…
IBM: Lou Gerstner scraps the breakup plan and keeps the company whole
Gerstner took IBM's top job in April 1993 after losses of about $8.1 billion, rejected a plan to split the company, and left in…
Microsoft: Satya Nadella moves the company from Windows to the cloud
After 18,000 job cuts in July 2014, Nadella made cloud services Microsoft's core; Azure passed $75 billion in revenue in 2025 and market value…
