Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games

In 2004 Regnery published TURNAROUND: CRISIS, LEADERSHIP, AND THE OLYMPIC GAMES. The top of the dust jacket reads "Governor of Massachusetts MITT ROMNEY." From 1999 until early 2002 Mitt Romney was CEO of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee (SLOC). Suddenly, on Monday March 18, 2002, from one day to the next, he gave up that job and rushed back home to Boston to run in the primaries for State Governor against a Republican incumbent widely considered unre-electable. Hence Regnery's correct assertion in 2004 that the book was written by a sitting Governor of Massachusetts (a position cleanly won and held for the next four years by Willard Mitt Romney). TURNAROUND was re-issued in 2007 with same cover photo but without being attributed to a sitting Governor. For Romney had just finished his stint in the state house and was now running for President! *** When Romney took over as CEO of SLOC in 1999, that organization was reeling from just revealed scandal (the organization having offered dubiously ethical favors to overseas officials to vote that Salt Lake City host the 2002 winter games). Might those games now be cancelled? Or re-awarded to another city? Mitt Romney determined otherwise and tells the story of how he applied to the looming disaster everything he had learned both at Harvard (advanced case study-rooted degrees in law and business) as well as corporate consultant and turnaround specialist in decades with two Boston-based Bain companies. When all the dust had settled March 15, 2002, the Salt Lake City winter games had a $56 million surplus. Athletes were happy. Olympic associations were happy. Fans were ecstatic. It was time to move on to turning around another mess. *** In TURNAROUND's "Epilogue," Romney tells how neither he nor wife Ann made time to celebrate on the spot the triumph of the 2002 Winter Olympics. After three years of unpaid work in Salt Lake City, they were flying back to Boston to save the Republican party in Massachusetts from feared extinction. He would run (successfully) for Governor. "The campaign was a good deal like a turnaround," Mitt wrote. Romney laid out the four elements of the so called "Bain Way" that he had used in Salt Lake City and would now use once again and with greater than ever confidence in the Bay State political campaign. (1) "... vision: know why you're running ... to help people"; (2) "assemble the right people for the team"; (3) "carry out a strategic audit. We analyzed the state and its problems"; and (4) "communicate the vision and challenge the team to stretch." *** TURNAROUND in its passages both about Utah and about Massachusetts shows its author, Mitt Romney, in his apparently pre-ordained element when facing titanic challenges. As wife Ann told the Boston GLOBE, her husband tackled only big messes: "He loves emergencies and catastrophes" (Ch. 3 "Strategic Audit"). *** COMMENT: Presumably, if he should take office as President in January 2013, then turning the Federal Government around from drowning in red ink to budget balance and surplus would be the kind of "emergency" that Mitt Romney "visions" himself putting right. -OOO-