After all, he spent nearly three decades planning, pruning unessential businesses and buying up competitors while rising through the ranks at Rhône-Poulenc.
"They are trying to prune the business of unprofitable contracts and shift it to higher-margin areas of the business that require more expertise," Mr. Noland said.
Some likewise fear that GE will not be fast or radical enough in pruning its other businesses to focus on those it sees as having most growth potential in energy, water, transport and health care.
And BP should have been in a better position than this, because it had been forced to radically prune its business to pay for the multibillion-dollar costs of Deepwater Horizon.
"Cisco has a unique opportunity to restructure, writeoff and prune its business units…and refresh its product portfolio through acquisitions or internal development to capture the next wave of technologies and markets that will be the drivers of growth for the next several years," Armacost added.
As well as pruning heads in business units, some chief executives are trimming their headquarters (HQs), too.Nortel is a case in point.
His latest sales pitch is that he can revive Cisco — a technology colossus that makes computer networking equipment — by pruning its sprawling business and refocusing on its strengths.
The focus on earnings and not revenue growth reflects the company's strategy of shifting into higher-margin businesses, while pruning less profitable operations, and steadily whittling costs throughout the corporation.
With ITIL, "the businesses start pruning,"Finehirsh says.
