The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies

Very interesting read--both the business as well as personal. I felt as though the author was speaking to me on a one to one.

THE TURNAROUND KID: WHAT I LEARNED RESCUING AMERICA'S MOST TROUBLED COMPANIES recounts the high points of the author's career rescuing American business disasters - and in the process offers college-level business libraries the opportunity to understand the evolution of a business genius. Blending business management concepts with a memoir, THE TURNAROUND KID shows how the author turned around his own life as well as businesses, reshaping and restructuring the very foundations of big business procedures in the process. An inspiring, enlightening account. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Mr. Miller comes across as a hard-working, pragmatic, unaffected and down to earth guy who sees the big picture and cares about people in it. We can only hope that there are more executives like him at the top of F500 companies. I would recommend this book to any MBA programme as a supplement to their business ethics programme or anybody who has ever struggled to calibrate his/her own moral compass under pressures from various constituencies.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable autobiography of Steve Miller, a rising Ford executive who became the go to guy for companies in crisis over more than two decades. At Chrysler, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Olympia & York, Morrison Knudsen, Federal Mogul, Waste Management, Reliance Group Holdings, Bethlehem Steel, Aetna and Delphi, he parachuted into companies on the brink of failure and tried to come up with the best solution. Sometimes the outcome is a roaring success, other times he has to settle for the best of a series of unpleasant choices, and other times he is ineffective. This book is more Miller's autobiography than a how-to guide to fixing broken companies. The book is only 230 pages long and each company's situation is only covered at a high level. Miller's strength as a businessman is his ability to take a fresh, hard look at the companies, face up to the cold reality and work with all parties to come up with the best possible solution. His book has many on the same strengths; he offers what appears to be an honest (sometimes brutally so) assessment of his own successes and failures, as well as those of the other parties in the drama. What emerges is the story of a leader who enjoys the excitement of trying to solve complex problems while trying, and succeeding, to do the right thing for his family and the people and companies that depend on him.

I suspect most people will buy this book for Miller's inside stories of salvaging (or attempting to salvage) value from failed companies from Chysler to Delco. They'll get their money's worth, there are concise, well-written accounts of the projects, including information that had not been previously reported. Aside from the business, Miller has opened up about some aspects of his life more deeply than most business autobiographers. In particular, his complex and unusual relationship to his wife Maggie (who dies in the book, Miller has since remarried) is described in sharply-etched stories that will leave readers puzzling long after the book is finished. There is also plenty of grist for Millerphiles and Millerphobes. You can see the career arc from the guy who wouldn't even mention the word "bankruptcy" at Chrysler in the late 1970s, to the guy who used bankruptcy like a rapier in the 1990s and 2000s (including becoming the poster child for rich retention agreements as he filed for Delco just before a legal change that would have restricted such "golden handcuff" payments). His fresh openness with the press was a major asset at Chrysler, by the end of the book he is refusing to comment to the press at all. Either Miller got tougher or the world did. But like him or hate him, I think he was the only person in Detroit with honesty and credibility to make everyone face some harsh reality, and he deserves a good share of the credit for the positive steps in management/labor relations of the past couple of years. If you want to hate him anyway, you can hate him for appearing to enjoy himself while forcing painful adjustments on everyone. However, the best reason to read this book is something I never expected to find. I've always wondered why anyone with alternatives even bothered with these distressed companies. You'd think shareholders would sell, managers and workers would find better places to work, customers would take their business elsewhere; and let the opportunists fight the hopeless for any remaining crumbs. Miller has an appreciation for corporate greatness. He starts each account with the former glories of the company, not just in terms of outside accomplishments, but how many people gave it their working lives, and were rewarded with financial security and genuine pride. This is not a guy working only for shareholders or creditors or management (and certainly not only for workers or customers). This is a guy who expects all those groups to sacrifice so corporate greatness can be restored. Right or wrong, he's not a liquidator or union-buster or deadbeat, he tries to be a turnaround kid.