Page 388 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

Sustainability and Resilience 363

survive disasters and achieve renewed vitality, in companies that
overcome competitive pressures by leveraging new technologies,
and hopefully in industrial societies that ensure their future prosper-
ity by learning to use natural resources more wisely.
Human enterprises have some advantages over natural sys-
tems—they are capable of foresight and planning, and they can trans-
form very rapidly, if necessary. However, in contrast, most engineered
systems—software, machines, buildings, and infrastructure—tend to
be brittle and vulnerable to sudden failure or gradual decay. There-
fore, the established principles of systems engineering are not suffi-
cient to “engineer” human enterprises. The challenge of enterprise
resilience is not merely to recover from disruptions and return to
business as usual; rather, it is to continually reexamine the world
with fresh eyes and be prepared to transform the organization in
response to the emerging needs of customers and other stakeholders.
Resilience may just be the missing ingredient that will enable sustain-
able growth.
Nowhere is the importance of resilience more evident than in the
field of supply chain management, where rapid globalization and
outsourcing have created massive interdependencies. All enterprises
rely on both their suppliers and their customers for business continu-
ity; therefore, an enterprise is only as resilient as its supply chain.
Numerous studies have shown that supply chain disruptions can
cause an immediate sharp decline in shareholder value, and some
companies never fully recover [12]. Enterprise resilience manage-
ment augments traditional risk management by designing supply

FIGURE 20.2 Conceptual framework for enterprise resilience.