This book summarizes insights from 40 years of leading successful turnarounds in healthcare services organizations large and small. The goal is to help readers avoid the need for a complex recovery, to successfully lead one of their own, or to choose wisely when selecting someone else to lead one. Designed to be concise, the book covers essential topics at a high level, supported by compelling graphics and charts. It assumes that readers bring their own business and leadership experience, enabling them to adapt the ideas presented to their unique challenges. Although this is based mainly on experiences in healthcare, many aspects of business and leadership are universal, and readers in other industries will find it helpful as well. This book does recommend industry experience on the part of a turnaround leader to minimize delays and unnecessary missteps. While it’s common to think of turnarounds as grim hair-shirt affairs characterized by endless cuts and austerity, they can actually be quite fun. It may sound strange to say it, but it’s common for management teams to forge lasting friendships in the intense, fast-paced atmosphere of a turnaround. It’s a time when the cream rises to the top and careers are made. Each team member’s best effort is needed, cooperation is essential and there is no time for petty office politics. Team members at all levels of an organization often find the atmosphere of a turnaround to be refreshing when they are treated respectfully, asked to help in tangible ways, included in forthright communications, and shown a vision of how things can be better. Helpful personal traits of a successful turnaround leader include decisiveness, curiosity, skepticism, a sense of humor, focus, intensity, discipline, inclusiveness, self-confidence, mentorship, openness to ideas, optimism, an ability to see problems as opportunities, and relentlessness in pursuit of improvement. A good understanding of capital, capital markets and the interests of the various participants in the company’s capital structure is essential for making informed decisions about available options and resource allocation. The approach outlined in this book has been deployed successfully in multiple organizations across the spectrum of healthcare services, from payors to providers and a broad variety of healthcare networks. Subsectors include health, dental, vision, life and workers’ compensation insurance, health maintenance organizations and bill review and third-party administrators serving commercial plans, Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare; dentistry and dental labs, ophthalmology and optometry, occupational medicine and urgent care, hospitals, radiation oncology, and sub-acute care, dermatology and dermatopathology, and pathology and pathology labs. In short, this approach works. Please enjoy this brief overview.