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Lee Iacocca
Born
Iacocca joined Chrysler in 1978 after Ford fired him, and found a company heading for bankruptcy. He won 1.5 billion dollars of federal loan guarantees in 1979, cut his own salary to one dollar, closed plants and squeezed concessions from workers and suppliers. The K-car platform and then the minivan, partly developed at Ford before him, restored profits, and Chrysler repaid the loans early in 1983. Tens of thousands of jobs went along the way.
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Lou Gerstner
Born
IBM lost about eight billion dollars in 1993, the year Gerstner arrived from RJR Nabisco, and the plan was to break it into separate companies. He kept it whole, arguing that customers wanted one supplier to integrate everything, built up IT services, cut costs and sold off assets, and returned it to strong profits within a few years. The recovery cost tens of thousands of jobs. He died in December 2025.
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Gordon Bethune
Born
Continental Airlines had been through two bankruptcies and ranked at the bottom for punctuality when Bethune, a former Boeing executive and mechanic, took charge in 1994. The fix was operational: paying every employee a bonus each month the airline finished in the top five for on-time arrivals, cutting unprofitable routes and restoring basic service. It went from heavy losses to profit in a year and won customer satisfaction awards later in the decade.
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Archie Norman
Born
Asda was near collapse with heavy debts in 1991 when Norman arrived from Kingfisher. With his deputy Allan Leighton he cut head office, sold non-core businesses, refocused on everyday low prices for family shoppers and encouraged store staff to speak up. The share price rose many times over, and Walmart bought Asda in 1999. Two decades later, as chairman of Marks & Spencer, he oversaw a second recovery with chief executive Stuart Machin.
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Michael O'Leary (businessman)
Born
Ryanair was a small, loss-making Irish airline when O'Leary, then the owners' financial adviser, was sent to study Southwest Airlines in the early 1990s. He copied its model hard: one aircraft type, secondary airports, quick turnarounds and fees for everything extra, and became chief executive in 1994. It became Europe's largest airline by passengers. Rows with unions, regulators and customers have been part of the method, and he remains chief executive.
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Steve Jobs
Born
Apple was about ninety days from running out of cash, by Jobs's own later account, when he returned in 1997. The concrete moves are what matter here: cutting the product range to four computers, a 150 million dollar investment and software deal with Microsoft, and the iMac in 1998, which returned it to profit. The iPod and iPhone came later, and the operational turnaround owed much to Tim Cook, hired in 1998 to fix the supply chain.
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Carlos Ghosn
Born
Renault sent Ghosn to Nissan in 1999 when it was deep in debt and losing money. His Nissan Revival Plan closed five Japanese plants, cut around 21,000 jobs, broke up the supplier keiretsu and refreshed the model range, and Nissan returned to profit within a year and cleared its car-business debt soon after. The ending is the caveat: he was arrested in Japan in 2018 over financial misconduct allegations and fled to Lebanon in 2019 before trial.
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Anne M. Mulcahy
Born
Mulcahy became Xerox's chief executive in 2001, when it had billions in debt, an accounting investigation and advisers urging bankruptcy. A long-serving insider, she refused bankruptcy, cut costs and nearly a third of jobs, sold assets but protected research spending, and spent much of her time with customers. Xerox was back in profit by 2003 and she handed over to Ursula Burns in 2009, one of the cleaner successions in this list.
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Justin King (businessman)
Born
Sainsbury's had lost its long-held first place to Tesco and was posting its first ever loss when King arrived from Marks & Spencer's food business in 2004. His three-year recovery plan focused on the basics, getting products on shelves through a broken new IT and depot system, cutting prices and hiring store staff, and he delivered on its sales targets. Market share stabilised and the chain grew steadily through his ten years in charge.
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Jørgen Vig Knudstorp
Born
Lego was losing heavily and weeks from breaching its banking terms when Knudstorp, a former McKinsey consultant, became chief executive in 2004. He cut the number of unique parts dramatically, sold the Legoland parks, outsourced some production and refocused on the core brick and its fans, including adult builders. The company went on to become the world's biggest toymaker by revenue. Job cuts in Denmark were part of the price.
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Sergio Marchionne
Marchionne did it twice. At Fiat from 2004 he flattened management, forced General Motors to pay two billion dollars to exit a merger option, and returned the carmaker to profit. In 2009 he took over a bankrupt Chrysler with US government support, merging it with Fiat, reviving Jeep and Ram, and repaying the loans ahead of schedule. Spinning off Ferrari in 2015 unlocked value too. He died suddenly in 2018.
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Edward D. Breen
Breen took over Tyco in 2002, just after its chief executive Dennis Kozlowski had been charged with looting the company and its credibility had collapsed. He replaced the entire board and most senior managers, cleaned up the accounts, settled lawsuits and in 2007 split the conglomerate into three separately listed companies. It is a turnaround built on governance rather than products, and he later led the DuPont and Dow restructuring.
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Alan Mulally
Born
Mulally came from Boeing in 2006 to a Ford that lost 12.7 billion dollars that year. His first big move was to mortgage almost everything, including the blue oval logo, for 23.6 billion dollars of credit, which let Ford survive 2008 without the government bailouts GM and Chrysler needed. Weekly meetings where managers colour-coded problems red forced honesty, and he sold Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and Aston Martin to focus on the Ford brand. Plants closed and many jobs went.
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Howard Schultz
Born
Schultz returned as chief executive in 2008 with same-store sales falling and the brand diluted by fast expansion. He closed around 600 US stores, shut every American shop for an afternoon to retrain baristas on espresso, cut breakfast sandwiches whose smell masked the coffee, then brought them back improved, and added a loyalty app. Sales and the share price recovered strongly by 2010. The store closures cost thousands of jobs.
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Kazuo Inamori
Born
Japan Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and the government asked Inamori, the 78-year-old founder of Kyocera, to fix it. He worked unpaid, split the airline into small units each accountable for its own profit, a system he called amoeba management, and cut routes, aircraft and about a third of staff. JAL went from huge losses to record profits within two years and relisted in 2012. The job cuts and pension reductions were severe.
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Kaz Hirai
Sony had lost money for four straight years, mostly on televisions, when Hirai, who had run PlayStation, became chief executive in 2012. His One Sony plan sold the Vaio PC business, spun off TVs into a separate company and cut thousands of jobs, while backing image sensors, games and music. By 2018 Sony posted record operating profit. His successor Kenichiro Yoshida, his finance chief, carried the strategy further.
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Hubert Joly
Born
When Joly joined Best Buy in 2012, analysts expected it to go the way of Circuit City, beaten by Amazon. He matched online prices, turned stores into showrooms that Samsung, Apple and Microsoft paid to run as shops within shops, and used the stores to ship online orders. Notably for this list, he avoided mass lay-offs of shop staff, cutting costs elsewhere. Sales and the share price recovered, and he stepped down in 2019.
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James Daunt
Born
Daunt ran his own small chain of London bookshops before taking on a loss-making Waterstones in 2011. He gave buying decisions back to local shop managers, stopped publishers paying for window displays and table placement, and made each shop feel individual. Waterstones returned to profit, and since 2019 he has done the same at Barnes & Noble, which is now opening dozens of new shops a year after a decade of closures. He leads both.
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Lisa Su
Born
AMD's shares were trading around two dollars and it was losing money when Su, an engineer, became chief executive in 2014. She narrowed its focus to high-performance chips, bet on the Zen processor design and on outsourcing manufacturing to TSMC, which turned out to be ahead of Intel's own factories. AMD regained large shares of the PC and server markets and became a major supplier of AI chips. She remains chief executive.
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Dave Lewis (businessman)
Lewis arrived from Unilever in 2014 to find Tesco losing market share and then uncovering a 250 million pound profit overstatement in its accounts. He sold overseas businesses and assets such as Dunnhumby, cut product lines, mended relationships with suppliers and invested in prices and staff in stores, returning Tesco to growth and profit before stepping down in 2020. Thousands of head office and store management jobs went in the process. Since January 2026 he has been chief executive of Diageo, another business in need of repair.
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Brian Niccol
Niccol took over Chipotle in 2018 after food-safety outbreaks had driven customers away, tightened kitchen procedures, built digital ordering and drive-through pick-up lanes, and sales and profits rose sharply. Starbucks hired him in 2024 to repeat the trick; his Back to Starbucks plan simplified the menu and restored service, and US same-store sales returned to growth in early 2026 after two years of decline. That second turnaround is still in progress, with around 2,000 corporate jobs cut.
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