Top ten corporate comebacks

F. Scott Fitzgerald may contend there are no second acts in life, but there are definitely some fantastic ones in business.

When a career is cut short, for whatever reason, unexpected roads sometimes open up which lead back to the top. And when these roads are taken, previously unthinkable corporate comebacks are achieved. It's not the norm, but when it does happen the clout of these leaders often increases further on the second time around. They personify the oft-chanted 1990s hit song: "I get knocked down, but I get up again".

The comeback can take many forms – a feel good redemption, a pugnacious refusal to be defeated, or a pure spurt of luck. Some climb back from the brink of failure or shame, while others simply get distracted or lose the element which made them great.

Whatever the story, as these top ten tales of corporate returns show, the characters involved provide a fascinating lesson in management techniques.

This is by no means a definitive list – it forms a kind of whistle-stop tour of some of the more standout cases in the field (both at home and overseas). There are plenty who missed out. One-time tycoon Alan Bond might not be as far down as he was, but you wouldn't say he's back. Media tyro Lachlan Murdoch's on his way, although that experiment has a way to run yet, while former Oxiana chief Owen Hegarty is almost back with the recent float of Tiger's Realm Coal.

So sit back, put on your favourite Rocky theme music, and consider these incredible corporate comebacks.

Mark McInnes

There are few things in the world more damaging to a man's reputation than a sexual scandal. The one thing Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and Dominique Strauss-Kahn have in common (apart from awesome hair for their age) is the painful knowledge of how bad these things can go.

Former David Jones chief executive Mark McInnes was caught in a kind of perfect storm of celebrity, gossip-column fashion branding and a multi-million dollar sexual harassment case. In an instant, he was stripped from the helm of the department store he had turned around – in McInnes' first three years at David Jones the share price doubled – and he retreated to consider a next move.

He successfully pulled this off – by the relative downfall-to-comeback timeframes on this list – rather quickly.

After quitting in shame in June 2010, McInnes was giving a proud press call beside Solomon Lew as the new chief of Premier Retail in March 2011.

McInnes knows retail, and he knows Australian retail. And he's obviously a tougher nut to crack than most people gave him credit for back when he was splashed across the business, legal and gossip sections of the nation's news outlets for all the wrong reasons. In July, McInnes announced a profit forecast downgrade and 50 store closures for Premier, so he's got a way to climb yet, but this is a man firmly on the comeback trail.

Solomon Lew

In a neat little segue, the man who's putting his faith in a big McInnes comeback is no stranger himself to falling down and getting back up again.

Solomon Lew was chairman of the Coles Myer board and one of the most powerful men not just in retail, but in Australia. Apparently still standing after twin blows from related-party share transaction dust-ups, Lew joined fellow big shot Lindsay Fox to patriotically step in and save Ansett Australia in November 2001. Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Because it's certainly not an Ansett plane, and Solomon Lew was no superman.

In March 2002 the consortium dropped the bid, and the months they'd kept it flying meant false hope and often unpaid work for thousands of employees who were suddenly left jobless. That same year Lew was wedged off the Coles Myer board by chairman Stan Wallis, despite reportedly blowing a small personal fortune campaigning to stay on.

It didn't take much wind out of the sails though, as Lew returned to Premier Investments as it bought Just Group in 2008. The group is now worth a tidy $1.3 billion, according to the latest BRW Rich List.

Steve Jobs

Where would a list of corporate comebacks be without Steve Jobs?

This month, Apple briefly became the world's most valuable company, ahead of Exxon Mobil. And it's on the rise. Last month it overtook the US government for cash on its books and its cultural clout far outweighs simple dollar valuations or meteoric share prices. As I type this I'm listening to my iPod.

In the great Apple narrative, it pays to remember how integral Steve Jobs has been. This is the man who helped actually physically build personal computing, who led the Macintosh project with the 1984 advert that every first-year marketing student in the world has watched until they want to hit Ridley Scott with a hammer, and who was unceremoniously booted from his own struggling company the following year after clashing with chief executive John Sculley.

And then, like an exiled knight returning to save his castle under heavy siege, Jobs rode back into Apple as an advisor after it bought his new company, quickly stepped in as chief executive and began to steer Apple in the fruitful direction of all things beginning with 'i'.

In the early 2000s Apple shares were trading for less than $8. Today they're trading for about $360, and take a dive every time Jobs coughs in public. Now that's a comeback.

Donald Trump

Slightly more divisive, but no less publicly successful in US business comebacks is Donald Trump.

A force of coiffed boardroom charisma, even the word 'ego' seems too small and insignificant to be applied to the blustering swell of public relations that is Trump. He developed and boomed through the roaring 1980s, expanded his property empire and built casinos with the kind of junk financing that would make a 2007-era mortgage broker blush, and owned a football team in the NFL-wannabe USFL, based in the New York wannabe New Jersey. But mounting debt and the crash of the late 80s brought him back down to earth, and an affair and resulting divorce from Ivana Trump didn't help the bank balance much.

He pushed through all that though, and managed to throw together a string of Trump Towers in various cities through the 2000s, while holding onto swathes of prime Manhattan real estate. Forbes reckons he's worth $3 billion and, of course, he is perennially mulling a Republican presidential run, which he seems to mull with more vigour in between seasons of his reality TV show The Apprentice.

David Leckie

Speaking of television, there's a TV comeback quite a few people missed because it all happened off-screen and in the boardroom.

For nearly a quarter of a century David Leckie was a Nine Network man, starting out as a sales executive in Melbourne before climbing the corporate antenna tower to managing director in 1990, and becoming CEO in 1994. He led Nine through a decade of undisputed success at the top of the Australian TV ratings, side by side with the Packers, before Kerry Packer sacked him in 2002.

Leckie promptly went to the rival Seven Network the following year, just as a change in the way ratings were assessed was made, and a major shake-up by Leckie's replacement at Nine, John Alexander, gave Seven a wedge back into the market. In a comeback that is still stinging years later (see the great photo of James Packer in 2009, when he allegedly told Leckie to "F**k off” at a party), Seven is a ratings darling today. Furthermore, this year he snared the chief executive spot at the media melange of Seven West, a company melding TV, newspaper, magazine and online assets, so Leckie's corporate story is far from over.

Andrew Forrest

The corporate world reacted savagely when they, ahem, twigged to the state of Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest's Anaconda Nickel in the early 2000s. A flurry of angry bond brokers and lawyers prompted Forrest's partners to boot him from the company, bringing the 'do the numbers first, worry about the mining second' approach he then took to the resources sector sharply to heel.

For a couple of years, at least. It was a little drop, but a big, big comeback. His stake in Fortescue Metals Group – a similarly headstrong and talked-up minerals venture – hit the iron-ore price paydirt and Forrest experienced an Apple-like value multiplication. He's laughing now, after topping the BRW Rich List in 2008 and Anaconda, now Minara, went on to become one of the most successful mineral exporters in the country.

Howard Schultz

There's a great episode of The Simpsons where a character is shopping in a mall that is gradually being converted to Starbucks stores. After asking for assistance, the shopkeeper replies "Better make it quick, kid, in five minutes this place is becoming a Starbucks”. Which pretty well sums up the problem with expansion the ubiquitous coffee company faced a few years back.

Schultz bought the fledgling group for a couple of million in 1987, ditching his wholesale coffee job to cultivate a caf empire. But he let it wither in the noughties, and the spread of stores went from a corporate success story to a punchline. In 2008 he took back the chief executive role at the company and began a turnaround comeback few expected, closing almost a thousand stores in his first two years back, but opening hundreds more, and tightening up operations globally.

John Hewson

Comeback, meet Fightback! Actually, maybe don't, because Fightback! was the famously terrible policy agenda that lost John Hewson the 'unloseable' election to Paul Keating in 1993.

It's pretty hard to imagine, looking at the mess Hewson made of that campaign, that the voting public would ever wistfully long for him as leader of the Liberal party again. But somehow Hewson has fought his way back into the Australian political consciousness through his noticeably un-conservative critiques of John Howard and, more recently, Tony Abbott. A string of financial management roles and some relaxed and popular appearances on the ABC have bestowed a wise, statesmanlike quality on Hewson that he must regret not finding when he was the de facto next prime minister.

Successful in business before his political career, including as an economist with the Reserve Bank and Macquarie Bank, today Hewson writes regularly in business media, chairs GSA Insurance Brokers, and is active in charity work as president of the Arthritis Foundation and chairman of Osteoporosis Australia.

Evan Thornley

Who says you have to fail to mount a comeback? Really, all you have to do is leave, then return. Evan Thornley made his resurgence not from the brink of the abyss, but from the edge of a different kind of power and success.

After making millions with his online startup Looksmart, Thornley was elected to the Victorian upper house in 2006. As an impressive political performer, Thornley was widely tipped to join the cabinet at the end of 2008 when he abruptly quit, to the chagrin of a good chunk of the Victorian Labor party which was busily on its way to losing the next election.

A founding director of the noisily activist political group GetUp!, Thornley made his corporate comeback as chief of the Australian division of Better Place, a company leading electric car infrastructure development around the world. He announced a deal last month with GE Australia for 1000 electric cars by 2015, so the return is just revving up.

Henry Ford

Now from the future of the automotive industry to the very beginning – it's easy to forget that Henry Ford, the man who is so totally and obviously connected to the Ford Motor Company, and cars themselves, actually founded two failed car companies first.

Chief engineer with Thomas Edison's Edison Illuminating Company in the late 1800s, Ford was successful and fascinated by experiments with engines. But in the early years after quitting that job, Ford didn't exactly leave the motoring world in his tracks. His efforts founding the Detroit Automobile Company amounted to nothing and he was forced out of the first Ford car company to bear his name in 1902 after issues with shareholders – though that company that would later become Cadillac.

Even when Ford started yet another company, sales were poor, and the Dodge brothers, along with a slew of other investors, had to prop him up. Which turned out not too shabbily for them, all things considered.

Today, the company bearing his name is experiencing somewhat of a comeback of its own. After flirting with annihilation in the global financial crisis, it is now comfortably paying down a multi-billion-dollar bailout loan, and unlike GM and Chrysler, made it through without a bankruptcy.