A Name to Watch out for in Corporate Restructuring: Dr. Christoph Lymbersky

Feb. 15, 2014 - PRLog -- The turnaround and restructuring industry is led by a few individuals who are not very well known to us “normal” people, but they are famous within their industry. Amongst them are John M. Collard, Jay Alix, David Lovett, and Donald Bibeault. These guys walk into the offices of huge multinational corporate CEOs as if they are best friends with them. Often, they may well be. They are the trusted advisors of presidents and top-level executives; of chairmen of global players and even directors of international consultings firms. They are the management elite and stay in the background as much as possible.

Someone who is getting getting more and more attention lately is Dr. Christoph Lymbersky. He is already very known in the academic world since he published a framework for corporate turnaround projects that leads to more successful and sustainable turnarounds. His book, The International Turnaround Management Standard, is one of Amazon’s bestsellers. Before its publication a lot of the research focused on the causes of decline and specific aspects of corporate restructuring, with some books looking at how to manage a turnaround process. Dr. Lymbersky, however, combined project management techniques with hundreds of best practice cases to develop a system that can lead virtually any company through a crisis situation and that targets every possible reason why turnarounds fail.

Today Dr. Lymbersky is consulted by the senior management of international corporations such as Deutsche Telekom, banks and mid-sized companies about corporate restructuring projects and strategic turnarounds. Many clients, especially those in need of his turnaround management advice, wish to remain anonymous and, having met Dr. Lymbersky in Frankfurt, Germany, this year, I bet they remain anonymous for ever.

This true expert comes across as considered, serious and very well educated. He doesn’t show off, he listens and he doesn’t say much, but when he talks it is straight to the point and well thought through, just as you would expect from somebody who dines with CEOs from around the world and handles difficult situations with a steady hand.

For six years now Dr. Lymbersky has been the managing director of the Turnaround Management Society, a not-for-profit organization that he has grown from an unofficial academic network to be one of the world’s leading consultant networks for turnaround managers and interim executives. “I still believe that the professional industry can profit from the research carried out in the academic world, and vice versa. Our whole Society is build around the principle of giving and taking. Every member contributes to the Turnaround Management Society in some way, and in turn every member profits from it. This is a principle that works to everybody’s advantage. The members know each other personally and support one another,” said Dr. Lymbersky, who created the turnaround management certification program, the “Certified International Turnaround Manager”, and who also publishes the Turnaround Management Journal. And because that is not enough, he recently bought Restructuring-Experts.com, an online network for turnaround, restructuring, and transformation consultants and works as a senior management consultant for Detecon International an ICT consulting firm.

After the meeting I was certainly impressed, but I‘m not the only one. My research shows that he has also impressed the world’s leading experts in corporate turnarounds such as Donald Bibeault and John Collard.

Donald Bibeault, who published the most popular book about the restructuring industry, Corporate Turnarounds: How Managers Turn Losers into Winners, said that he is “very pleased that Dr. Christoph Lymbersky and his colleagues have created the International Turnaround Management Standard to perpetuate and enhance the research and intellectual underpinnings of the turnaround management profession.”

John M. Collard, who has been a consultant to President Bush (both Junior and Senior), President Clinton, and Jelzin on corporate restructurings and who has proved himself a true expert over the last 40 years, wrote about him that: “The International Turnaround Management Standard is a brilliant rendition of strategies and actions that can be applied to the turnaround process. Dr. Lymbersky has done a marvelous job of bringing together methodologies for practitioners.”

When reminded of these statements, Dr. Lymbersky smiled and said, “There are a few people I truly look up to, and John, Donald, and David Lovett are certainly amongst them.” They are part of the world’s silent elite—the turnaround industry, a group that he certainly belongs to as well. But there is one thing that distinguishes him from the others: he is European. Over the last 40 years the world of corporate restructuring has looked to the USA; now Europe has a rising star in turnaround management as well.

I’m sure we will hear a lot more from him in the future. The industry needs true leaders who lead by example and set a standard, not only for industry practice but for other restructuring consultants and students who want to save jobs in the future.

The full article is published in the Higher Life Magazin in March 2014. The interview was done by Mira C. Jones of the Higher Life Magazin