HBR On Strategy · Harvard Business Review

How to Lead a Successful Turnaround

·29 min·1 clip

When you walk in, it's always worse than you thought. Prepare for negative surprises.

Peter Cuneo, who led seven successful corporate turnarounds including Marvel (bankruptcy to billion-dollar enterprise), shares the philosophy and tactics behind his consistent success. Core insight: companies fail due to culture/values misalignment, not finances. Cuneo employs a first-week assessment asking direct reports to identify problems, responsible parties, and their solutions—revealing who has accountability mindset vs. blame-shifting. He acknowledges that turnarounds always reveal conditions worse than external analysis predicts, requiring mental preparation. Paradoxically, Cuneo avoids imposing his vision, instead adopting promising strategies from team members (e.g., Avi Arad's film approach at Marvel). Communication quality—not frequency of announcements—and walking the aisles build trust during crisis. Three-year timelines compress execution; success requires people comfortable with ambiguity and upside financial incentives.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at how turnarounds start with culture, not the balance sheet.

Peter Cuneo treats turnarounds as a cultural problem before a financial one, and that is the thread running through the discussion. He says the first move is to find people who know the company, ask what they are hearing, and check whether the value system has slipped.

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Why you'd press play

You need a sober read on whether a struggling business can be rescued without pretending it is fine.

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