'Inside the Turnaround' Returns!

I'm sorry about the delay. These two stories contain a little more negative content, but I don't wish to make that the focus. Let me start with a little bridge to these two situations.

Inside the Turnaround Seasons Two and Three, Introduction: ’Halo and Realpolitik Diplomacy’

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I apologize for the delay in this.? In the coming episodes, things will change. At the last job, I suppose that it is clear that pretty much the whole company (actually with the exception of one department) was committed to and, as possible, working on the turnaround. ?So, overall, a lot was positive. ?In the next two situations there were small groups working on the turnaround, and there were often many, often a majority of the company’s staff, departments, etc.? that actively fought the turnaround.? I fact at one company there was an executive that had punched someone in a previous meeting.? At another, one of the executives bore a resemblance to the characters Sydney Greenstreet played in a series of 1940’s film noir detective movies. ?So, not surprisingly, there were more adversaries than you could count.

?But let me explain the titles.? Halo is a video game where, although I’ve never played it, I understand that the characters all parachute down into, well, a world of trouble.? I didn’t use a parachute, but from the moment, very soon after my arrival, that I was asked to do the turnaround, I met a world of resistance.? So, it feels as if I parachuted in.

The second is about how things worked in the second company when it still existed.? One of the underlying problems actually existed at both companies.? In the past, one strategy for managing executives was what you might call “only the strong survive”.? We would all be thrown into the company’s operations and expected to fight for our individual interests.? There are two problems with this.? First, being a good “fighter” need not correlate with having good ideas.? Second it rewards supporting self-centered “bad for the company” ideas. An example of a realpolitik situation that arose involved an unprofitable situation in a program managed by a once-friend of mine.? Once I communicated the issue, we were on opposite sides essentially forever.

Okay, so that is a set of mostly negative things, which made me worry about the tone of this for a few weeks (hence the delay).? But let me also include some positive ones:

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·?????? At the first company, the ‘successful-as long-as-I-was-there’ turnaround/rate increase did not cause policyholders to leave ‘in droves’.? So, I made the company a massive amount of money, mostly single-handedly.? This a great story to tell at, say, a cocktail party, as long as you have the right audience.

·?????? At the second company, a very unique claims situation developed. My staff and I developed what you might call a new type of model. There was a lot of resistance to its use, but the approaches others presented fell apart quickly.? Some twentyish years later I got a phone call from someone purporting to be an actuary with the name as one of my high school best friends’ sister (there is no such actuary).? Somehow, I think that means others realize that we did well.

·?????? At the second company, all the staff were mostly untrained when I arrived.? A few years later, during one of our marathon weekly sessions analyzing loss reserves, I heard ‘Joe, you can go home. We know exactly what to and (something like) we respect that you want to be here like we are but go home.’

·?????? The evidence is that both companies have changed significantly, at least one of them clearly for the better.

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Loss TransFormer IV: The enhanced spreadsheet is done.? Among the improvements are estimates of the before, after and improvement it generates.? The launch is coming soon.