Business Restructuring Quotes

The world’s consultants spend their time advising on restructuring, optimizing processes and inventories, finding every possible source of cost savings and cost synergies. At the same time, the greatest cost of all is ignored: the cost of assumptions. The cost of relying on assumptions is going through the roof.

Organizational restructuring is something that should take place within a company fairly regularly. With our modern day economy being as dynamic as it is, and with change being as prevalent as it is, companies need to be adaptive and flexible - and that requires regular restructuring.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we love helping businesses adapt to change. We all live and work in a dynamic and ever-changing economy. The businesses that are able to adapt, pivot and restructure are the businesses that are most positioned to thrive through the changes.

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The New York Times captured the new corporate order succintly in 1987, reporting that it 'eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'.

We all live and work in a dynamic and ever-changing economy. The businesses that are able to adapt, pivot and restructure as needed are the businesses that are most positioned to thrive through the changes.

The recipe for success in business is this: increase profits and forecasts by reducing expenses through labor elimination and restructure.

Softwares are becoming the new cargo ships and freight trucks. Digital files are becoming the new core commodities. The formers won't eliminate the latters, but a restructuring is happening.

Loan restructuring may be explored as a collaborative solution between commercial bankers and businesses facing financial challenges. In the event of crises, it may be the best option for everyone.

Something out of the ordinary course of business is taking place that creates an investment opportunity. The list of corporate events that can result in big profits for you runs the gamut—spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, asset sales, distributions.

Restructuring may occur if a business faces financial challenges, involving changes to loan terms. It can be a tedious process, but often times, better than the alternatives.

Once upon a time, maybe the greater entity of [REDACTED] cared about the souls within its walls, but that all changed when the Benefactors took over. New initiatives were put into place. The company was restructured, reorganized to suit the needs of the business.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

This neo-liberal establishment would have us believe that, during its miracle years between the 1960s and the 1980s, Korea pursued a neo-liberal economic development strategy. The reality, however, was very different indeed. What Korea actually did during these decades was to nurture certain new industries, selected by the government in consultation with the private sector, through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support (e.g., overseas marketing information services provided by the state export agency) until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition. The government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business-credit. Some big projects were undertaken directly by state-owned enterprises-the steel maker, POSCO, being the best example-although the country had a pragmatic, rather than ideological, attitude to the issue of state ownership. If private enterprises worked well, that was fine; if they did not invest in important areas, the government had no qualms about setting up state-owned enterprises (SOEs); and if some private enterprises were mismanaged, the government often took them over, restructured them, and usually (but not always) sold them off again.

Consider the average worker in almost any urban industrialized city. The alarm rings at six forty-five and our workingman or -woman is up and at it. Check the phone. Shower. Dress in the professional uniform—suits for some, coveralls for others, scrubs for the medical professionals, jeans and T-shirts for construction workers. Breakfast, if there’s time. Grab commuter mug and briefcase (or lunch box). Hop in the car for the daily punishment called rush hour or get on a bus or train packed crushingly tight. On the job from nine to five (or longer). Deal with the boss. Deal with the coworker sent by the devil to rub you the wrong way. Deal with suppliers. Deal with clients/customers/patients. E-mails pile up. Act busy. Scroll through social media feeds. Hide mistakes. Smile when handed impossible deadlines. Give a sigh of relief when the ax known as “restructuring” or “downsizing”—or just plain getting laid off—falls on other heads. Shoulder the added workload. Watch the clock. Argue with your conscience but agree with the boss. Smile again. Five o’clock. Back in the car or on the bus or train for the evening commute. Home. Act human with your partner, kids, or roommates. Cook. Post a picture of your dinner online. Eat. Watch an episode of your favorite show. Answer one last e-mail. Bed. Eight hours of blessed oblivion—if we’re lucky.

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure. To counter the sordid image created by Burns and the old school of venal detectives, Hoover adopted the approach of Progressive thinkers who advocated for ruthlessly efficient systems of management. These systems were modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer, who argued that companies should be run “scientifically,” with each worker’s task minutely analyzed and quantified. Applying these methods to government, Progressives sought to end the tradition of crooked party bosses packing government agencies, including law enforcement, with patrons and hacks. Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“ the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I. As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age. The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image. Reporters noted that the “days of ‘old sleuth’ are over” and that Hoover had “scrapped the old ‘gum shoe, dark lantern and false moustache’ traditions of the Bureau of Investigation and substituted business methods of procedure.” One article said, “He plays golf. Whoever could picture Old Sleuth doing that?

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

RAND HOLSTON: Forrest Gump is a movie I am extremely proud of. I represented Wendy Finerman and Steve Tisch, the producers. STEVE TISCH: Gump was ’94 but we set up the project at Warner Bros. in ’85—a nine-year development gestation period. It didn’t hurt that Ovitz wanted Gump to be made. Hanks and Zemeckis were clients. When the head of the most important talent agency in the business at that time says he wants to make something happen and he’s very passionate about making something happen, it’s a lot of wind in your sail. RAND HOLSTON: We had to restructure the deal more than once. The studio decided it wasn’t willing to make the picture for what had been previously discussed, and when they gave us the new number, it was clear the only way to get the film made was taking the principals above the line—Bob Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Wendy, and Steve—to take less cash up front, and we made sure they were able to get more gross points on the back end. This turned out to be a really good deal for all of them. ROBERT ZEMECKIS: The studio was going to shut the movie down if Tom and I didn’t give our fees back. This was something that they do all the time: There’s forty-eight hours left before you shoot, and they say you’ve got to take X amount of million dollars out of the budget. So we said, “How are we going to do that now? We’ve got to start shooting in forty-eight hours.” And it comes back, “Well, you guys are just going to have to give us back your fees.

The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.

After January 1, 1959, the Castro Revolution changed the way business was done in Cuba. Abruptly, supplies for Cubana were no longer available, most routes were altered or suspended, and many of the pilots deserted their jobs or were exiled. In May of 1960, the new Castro administration merged all of the existing Cuban airlines and nationalized them under a drastically restructured Cubana management. At the time, many of Cubana’s experienced personnel took advantage of their foreign connections, and left for employment with other airlines. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, two of the remaining Cubana DC-3’s were destroyed in the selective bombing of Cuba’s airports. Actually the only civil aviation airport that was proven to be bombed was the Antonio Maceo Airport in Santiago de Cuba. During the following years, the number of hijackings increased and some aircraft were abandoned at American airports, as the flight crews sought asylum in the United States. This corporate instability, as well as political unrest, resulted in a drastic reduction of passengers willing to fly with Cubana. Of course, this resulted in a severe reduction in revenue, making the airline less competitive. The Castro régime reacted by blaming the CIA for many of Cubana’s problems. However, slowly, except to the United States, most of the scheduled flights were restored. Not being able to replace their aging fleet with American manufactured aircraft, they turned to the Soviet Union. Currently Cubana’s fleet includes Ukrainian designed and built Antonov An-148’s and An-158’s. The Cubana fleet also has Soviet designed and built Illyushin II-96’s and Tupolev TU-204’s built in Kazan, Russia. Despite daunting difficulties, primarily due to the United States’ imposed embargo and the lack of sufficient assistance from Canada, efforts to expand and improve operations during the 1990’s proved successful. “AeroCaribbean” originally named “Empresa Aero” was established in 1982 to serve as Cuba’s domestic airline. It also supported Cubana’s operations and undertook its maintenance. Today Cubana’s scheduled service includes many Caribbean, European, South and Central American destinations. In North America, the airline flies to Mexico and Canada. With Cuban tourism increasing, Cubana has positioned itself to be relatively competitive. However much depends on Cuba’s future relations with the United States. The embargo imposed in February of 1962 continues and is the longest on record. However, Cubana has continued to expand, helping to make Cuba one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America. A little known fact is that although Cubana, as expected, is wholly owned by the Cuban government, the other Cuban airlines are technically not. Instead, they are held, operated and maintained by the Cuban military, having been created by Raúl Castro during his tenure as the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

On top of the potential for restructuring the business, there are significant bloated costs to trim. General Insurance is paying for expensive sponsorship deals with sports teams that offer little benefit. It needlessly maintains two Gulfstream private jets. Some managers work four days a week because their workloads are perennially light. Bonus plans have targets that are far too easy to meet. Pensions are inexplicably overfunded, and the company’s contributions to pension programs can be scaled back to the lower end of targets set by regulators. The IT department is overstaffed and full of pet projects that the business will never realize value from. Low-grade IT can be outsourced to Asia.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8

Motherhood, however, took her by surprise. She found herself so in love with her children that she felt a need to change and restructure her life to afford time with her two bundles of joy. It led to her next phase of entrepreneurship, starting a string of baby-and-mother-related businesses. CRIB is a platform for mothers and women to network, and Trehaus provides the space for working mothers to have a career and yet be there for the baby’s first moments.

The evidence of past mistakes was still everywhere in 2000. Koch Industries was still carrying the accumulated litter that was left behind by countless Value Creation Strategies, years of acquisitions, and rapid growth. As Koch reviewed its holdings, one executive described the corporate structure as representing a table piled high at a rummage sale, full of odds and ends that had no apparent rationale for belonging together. Koch began to unload these properties, selling off pipeline holdings like the Chase Transportation Company. It sold a chemical firm called Koch Microelectronic Service Company and closed down a new $30 million chemical plant in Bryan, Texas. Over a period of years, Koch would sell off thousands of miles of pipelines. The corporate odds and ends were discarded. The remaining businesses at Koch were restructured and streamlined. The most important division, Koch Petroleum, was renamed Flint Hills Resources and given new leaders. Other businesses were consolidated under a new, simplified structure that put them under the umbrella of a few new companies like Koch Minerals, Koch Supply & Trading, and Koch Chemical Technology Group.

The company created a new team of top executives called the business development board, whose sole job was to look for other companies to buy. This group was essentially a reincarnation of the central development group that Brad Hall had overseen in the late 1990s, but it was restructured in a way that made it larger, more influential, and capable of closing deals that were larger by an order of magnitude than anything Koch had done before. The new development group rivaled any deal-making entity on Wall Street. The team had a steady river of cash to work with thanks to the steady flow of money generated at Pine Bend and other assets. The team also made use of Koch Industries’ nearly pristine credit rating,I which made it cheap and easy to get big loans. Even this new strategy—to push for growth and limit risk with a corporate veil—rested on a deeper, more important idea. This idea was the centerpiece of Koch’s new game plan, which relied on one competitive advantage more than any other: Koch’s superior information. Koch was seen by outsiders as an energy company, but, within the firm, it was seen quite differently. Charles Koch and his lieutenants considered Koch to be an information-gathering machine that built up stores of knowledge that were deeper and sharper than its competitors’. This strategy traced back to Koch Industries’ earliest days, but with the new business development board in place, it reached the level of a fine art. Koch’s newly designed companies, like Koch Minerals, each had their own mini development teams that became like searchlights, trained on the various industries in which they operated. Whatever they saw and learned was transmitted to the central development board, which synthesized the information with knowledge that was flowing in from Koch’s other companies. The development board also undertook studies of its own, looking for new opportunities beyond the existing Koch universe.

Big meat companies like Tyson had a critical advantage on their side in the argument over how to restructure the nation’s food system. Their advantage was that they represented the status quo. It is far easier for a business to revolutionize an industry than it is for regulators to go back in and tinker with the gears of production, hoping to benefit the public. Iowa attorney general Tom Miller and his lieutenant Eric Tabor were able to impose new ground rules on industrial hog production because they intervened when the industry was still evolving. They acted when farmers were building the first confinement hog houses and signing their first contracts with integrators. The story was different for the entrenched southern poultry industry. It had been tightly integrated going back to the 1950s and 1960s. To impose similar rules on that business would mean destroying existing relationships and replacing them with a government-prescribed alternative. In the face of such actions, companies can argue convincingly that the government is experimenting in a field of worrisome unknowns.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth . . . and say: “This is not just.” . . . A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of spiritual uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Trust is now recognized as a topic worthy of academic effort. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, researchers Robert Galford and Anne Siebold Drapeau identified five simple ways to destroy trust in any organization:122 1.   Inconsistent messages—management proclaims one thing, actually does another 2.   Inconsistent standards—people feel that they are being treated differently because of where they work, which legacy organization they came from, etc. 3.   Misplaced benevolence—ignoring a poor performing or untrustworthy manager, or employee 4.   “Elephants in the parlor”—ignoring the role that office politics actually plays in their organization 5.   “Rumors in a vacuum”—senior managers embargo all information, or greatly restrict its flow—i.e., to only certain levels of management—during complex initiatives, merger discussions, restructuring, etc.

If you want to break through to higher levels of performance, you must allow yourself to be restructured.

The message: Paris and Rome must reform their economies, removing barriers to the creation of businesses and jobs. Countries with the flexibility to spend more while staying within EU deficit rules should do so, creating what Mr Draghi described as “a more growth-friendly overall fiscal stance for the euro area”. Though the ECB president did not name names, that suggestion was widely interpreted as a call for Germany, the eurozone’s dominant economic power, to raid its fiscal coffers. “The part of Mr Draghi’s speech on the fiscal stance was an innovation,” says Lucrezia Reichlin, a professor at London Business School and a former head of research at the ECB. “The idea of co-ordination between monetary and fiscal policy from a euro area perspective is a hint to Germany.” France, already used to the ECB’s grumbles that it should do more to restructure the economy, received Mr Draghi’s calls warmly.

A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer. This team was headed by two men with the same first name, whom Alvy and I nicknamed “the Dweebs” because they didn’t understand a thing about the business we were in. Those two guys threw around management consulting terms (they loved to tout their “corporate intuition” and constantly urged us to make “strategic alliances”), but they didn’t seem at all insightful about how to make us attractive to buyers or about which buyers to pursue. At one point, they called us into an office, sat us down, and said that to cut costs, we should lay off all our employees until after our division was sold—at which point we could discuss rehiring them. In addition to the emotional toll we knew this would take, what bugged us about this suggestion was that our real selling point—the thing that had attracted potential suitors thus far—was the talent we’d gathered. Without that, we had nothing. So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine.

They reallocate resources flexibly and on an ongoing basis, rather than going through sudden divestitures or restructurings.

Independent Licensed Insolvency Practitioners, providing solutions for business directors who are struggling with financial pressures. We are experienced in rescuing and restructuring businesses across a wide range of business sectors.

The first pillar of the plan to fall into place was organizational. Almost immediately, Charles Koch set about restructuring the interlocking group of companies that Fred Koch had left behind. The confusing amalgam of corporate entities—the engineering company, the oil gathering business, the pipelines, the ranches—would soon be welded into a single entity. The second pillar of Charles Koch’s plan was physical: the company would be based in a new office complex. Before Fred Koch died, the company had offices in a downtown building that was named after him. But by a stroke of coincidence, that building was scheduled to be demolished just when Fred died, torn down in order to make way for an urban renewal project. In its place, Charles Koch oversaw the construction of new headquarters, this one on the far-northeast corner of town.

I looked at each property and figured out how much debt service it could handle based on its existing cash flow. I’d restructure the debt at a lower interest rate and put $1 down on the property along with a limited cash-flow guarantee to ensure the institution would not go into default while waiting for the market to recover.

Zhang is also deeply involved in an ongoing campaign to restructure Haier and make it into a company where every element is entrepreneurial and every employee regards him or herself as an entrepreneur.

If there is one place we should begin, it is with a resolve to not conceal sins, to not seal ourselves off from people's suffering by burying it under a mountain of vacuous bullshit. Euphemisms are an attempt to find pleasant words for an ugly reality, and in doing so, they allow their users to avoid feeling guilty or uncomfortable. This is why they are particularly common in the business world, where executives do not want to admit that they are ruining a lot of people's lives through mass firings and so discuss restructuring, outsourcing, redundancy, and streamlining. An independent contractor is a worker who has no benefits or guaranteed hours, and increasing efficiency often means making people do more work in less time.

Algorithms aren’t displacing human workers at these companies, simply because the humans were never there to begin with. But as the lower costs and superior services of these companies drive gains to market share, they will apply pressure to their employee-heavy rivals. Those companies will be forced to adapt from the ground up—restructuring their workflows to leverage AI and reduce employees—or risk going out of business. Either way, the end result is the same: there will be fewer workers.

I agree with you. I can't do this anymore either." She stiffened against him and made to turn around, but he stopped her. "I owe you an apology," he began quietly. "I'm sorry I made you feel like you couldn't trust me. I know you have no reason to, not with my track record, but I want you to know you can. When I met you, my whole life changed. If I could, I would go back and tell you the truth about everything - my name, Erin, all of it. I had no idea you were going to be.. the one." This time when she tried to sit up, Josh didn't stop her. "What?" she asked with trembling lips. "You're the one, Nicole," he said softly, his eyes meeting hers. "When I woke up the next morning and you were gone. I went crazy trying to find you. I didn't even know where to begin to look And then, last month, when I came to your house? I couldn't believe my good fortune. I was getting a second chance. I should have been honest with you that first night when I came back and told you I loved you. I had been looking for you. Waiting for you. There is no other woman for me, Nicole. Not now. Not ever. It's you." Her eyes welled with tears. "I don't know how to believe you." The honest admission hurt for her to even say, and when she saw understanding in his eyes, she felt her first glimmer of hope. Taking her hands in his, he pulled her close. "Let me what I've been up to." he began. "First those meetings in RTP? Those were with real estate agents. I'm moving my business here." "But what about--?" "Shh," he interrupted. "After we spoke Monday night, I sort of went a little crazy. I knew I had already gotten the ball rolling with moving the business but I knew it wasn't enough. So I did a little restructuring and promoted two of my guys. They'll be handling most of the traveling from now on. I may still have to go to a job site from time to time, but if I do then I want you and Ellie with me." "Josh, that wasn't--" "Hear me out." He placed one finger on her lips. "I'd like to keep the house in Wilmington because it's right on the beach and I'd love for us to have a place to go just to get away, but if you'd like to pick one of your own, I can sell it." "What are you saying?" He smiled as he leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. "What I'm saying is I love you. I want a life with you. I want to be there every day for you and Ellie. I want us to have more babies, and I want to be there to see them grow. I love you Nicole." "Oh my..." "I didn't plan on doing this today," he said as he shifted and dropped to one knee on the floor in front of her. "And I don't have your ring with me; it's back at David's." He winked. "But, Nicole Taylor, I want you to be my wife. I love you, and i want to spend every day of my life with you. Will you marry me?" "I knew everything I needed to know about you three years ago. Coming here and finding you again and seeing the way you have loved and cared for our daughter? That just confirmed it all. You are everything I've ever wanted, all I ever needed." "Me?" she mouthed, unable to speak. He nodded. "Always.

Being from Texas, I can’t help but have learned a few things about the oil business. I’m far from being an expert, mind you, but one of the things I have learned is that you don’t just go out and pick a spot and start drilling. If you want to minimize your risks, you do some seismic testing — which is basically a sophisticated way to check out the landscape to see what it might produce. Since the size and shape of a subsurface formation is unknown, an electronic device is used to shoot sonarlike impulses down toward the formation from different points of view. The matter starts to take shape as it is seen from the various perspectives. In terms of second-half seismic testing, your “subsurface formation” is that imponderable matter regarding how you will restructure your life. Your idea is indistinct in size and shape, and you can see it only from a limited viewpoint, so you go to six or eight different people you trust and ask them how they see it. Their “sonar” will reflect a part of the picture that you could not see before, and eventually the most inchoate and vaguest matters will begin to assume a definite size and shape. Then at least you know whether to drill or not. You

Traditionally, companies restructure their businesses periodically to cut costs, primarily through mass layoffs and closures. Perpetual restructuring is a more gradual, moderate, and humbler approach. Instead of slashing costs dramatically all at once, keep your fixed costs steady while growing sales year over year. Operate more efficiently, doing just a bit more each year with roughly the same resources you used the previous year. To achieve those efficiency gains, deploy a variety of smaller restructuring programs that support ongoing process-improvement initiatives. Push to get a bit better—more efficient, more effective, more innovative—each year. Over time, as your business grows, deliver part of the added profits to investors, but set aside a portion to fund additional investments in R&D, geographic expansion, process improvement, sales coverage, and strategic portfolio management (acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures).