5 Remarkable Business Comebacks [Slideshow]

Some companies fall on hard times and disappear. Others falter only to roar back bigger and better than ever.

What distinguishes the two groups? Every business comeback is different, but a few common themes emerge. Invariably, the survivors bring in new leadership. Often, those leaders refocus the company on its core competencies — and many impose fiscal discipline on organizations that have become flabby.

Here are five high-profile turnaround stories that offer insights into putting your own company back on solid ground when sales and profits start moving in the wrong direction.

Apple Inc.

Apple is a Wall Street darling these days but was a dog in the mid-1990s, losing market share and hemorrhaging cash. Then co-founder Steve Jobs, who’d departed in 1984 after a dispute with his board, came back. Jobs shut down projects that were draining cash and transformed Apple from a computer maker into a consumer electronics company with products that looked and worked better than the competition’s.

Lessons: Leadership matters. Apple always had plenty of brainpower but wasn’t always focused. In Jobs, the company found a leader with the vision to anticipate what customers would want and the charisma to convince employees to deliver them — all while meeting his famously demanding standards.

In December 2008, you could buy a share of Ford for less than a buck. Many people assumed the company would end up in bankruptcy court with General Motors and Chrysler. But Ford had some things those others didn’t: CEO Alan Mulally, whom William Ford Jr. brought in from Boeing to replace him, and close to $23.5 billion in cash the company had just raised by audaciously mortgaging its factories and other assets. With more financial flexibility than its domestic competitors and Mulally’s manufacturing and fiscal discipline, Ford began creating new vehicles that rivaled their Japanese counterparts in quality and fuel efficiency. It has since seen its market share grow and its stock recover.

Lessons: Be courageous enough to bring in outside help if you’re not getting the job done on your own. Also, eliminate waste. Under Mulally, Ford pared its structural costs by more than $10 billion and stopped building completely different cars for different worldwide markets, turning instead to global cars that can be tweaked for individual markets.

McDonald’s has been an American icon for so long that it’s easy to forget the company lost its mojo in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In January 2003,  McDonald’s reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1965. As management put expansion plans ahead of operating discipline, customers grew critical of its food and the cleanliness of its restaurants. In came new CEO Jim Cantalupo, who overhauled products, operations and marketing. The company also spiffed up its restaurants, rededicated itself to serving better food, and expanded into healthier entrees such as salads. Today, McDonald’s remains king of the fast-food empire.

Lessons: Focus on the fundamentals. When Cantalupo came aboard, he vowed that McDonald’s would once again deliver customers hot food and maintain clean restrooms. It was a simple message, but one that focused restaurant operators and resonated with customers. He also backed off his predecessor’s expansion into other restaurant concepts, allowing the company to devote fuller attention to its core business.

Big Blue has been a bulwark of the information age for half a century, but it had become a plodding, inward-looking behemoth by 1993 when it posted an $8 billion loss — a U.S. company record at the time. Louis V. Gerstner Jr. took over as chairman and CEO and quickly led IBM back from the brink of bankruptcy. While many thought the company could be saved only by breaking it apart, Gerstner insisted on holding it together and refocusing it on delivering value to customers by becoming not just a hardware vendor, but also a provider of complete IT solutions.

Lessons: A company’s culture is critical to its success. Arriving at IBM, Gerstner found a culture focused on internal rules and conflicts. Business units hid things from each other and were more likely to fight over intra-company billings than collaborate on satisfying customers. To drive change, Gerstner not only declared a new culture, but created financial incentives for managers to embrace it.

After becoming one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates through acquisitions, Tyco found itself in an accounting scandal in the summer of 2002 and facing an $11 billion debt payment it couldn’t cover. Ed Breen was brought in to replace disgraced chairman and CEO Dennis Kozlowski and promptly replaced the board of directors and most of the company’s senior management team. He also shed non-core assets and imposed a new era of fiscal prudence, quickly reversing the company’s financial fortunes.

Lessons: Focus on your winners, get rid of your losers, and shun unnecessary spending. Breen closed unproductive business units at Tyco and rid the company of financial excesses that had become commonplace under Kozlowski, whose purchase of a $6,000 shower curtain with company funds may go down as one of the lasting symbols of corporate excess.

A former reporter and editor for Dow Jones, where he wrote for The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, Randy Myers is a contributing editor for CFO and Corporate Board Member magazines.