Q: How did you gravitate into turnaround/restructuring work? Rizzardi: It was not by design. I began to practice law in 1979. In 1982, I was working at a four-lawyer firm in Auburn, a small town south of Seattle. The town’s senior lawyers regularly gathered for cocktails, and one night they learned...

As 2020 comes to a close, we look back on a year that started much differently than it will end. It started with a high at the 2020 DIC and in a strange twist of unexpected fate, will close on an even higher note because of TMA Innovation. Few words can express my gratitude to a leadership,...

One of my favorite pastimes at the end of the year is perusing retrospective reviews of noteworthy and historical events from the prior 12 months. Even back when I was in elementary school, I loved to review the various Top 10 lists on television and radio (the internet was not quite a thing yet)...

Remember when you sat through a conference session or read an article about managing disruption? Maybe you read in this very magazine about the impact of disruption and how it related to business planning, operations, and turnarounds. Before COVID, our understanding of disruption and its management...

A pivot with purpose is only as impactful as the people who make it so. And as we journey into TMA Tomorrow, our pivot with purpose has been defining, perhaps generationally so. We have defined tomorrow by embracing today. We have pivoted to adapt to an ever-changing landscape made especially...

I have often talked about how TMA has pivoted with purpose and, even before the pandemic, was creating a new pathway to TMA Tomorrow. The current state of affairs, however, has accelerated that charge, and at the forefront of it all is technology. The advent of a global pandemic has shown that...

If there are overused words and phrases for 2020, they are understandably “new normal,” “pivot,” and “uncertain.” If you are looking for alternatives to “uncertain,” I suggest the following substitutes: unsettled, unresolved, unsure, unpredictable, and, my personal favorites, irregular, hairy, and...