Page 11 - The Resilient Organization

x Preface

for resilience is sisu, meaning tenacity, while the Californians admire
“cool.” I have tried to balance the two in this book: strategic resilience is
both the ability to be selectively tenacious but also to engage fullheartedly
and intensely in the joy of discovery.
As a professor in the Helsinki School of Economics (part of the new
Aalto University in Finland), I have tried to convey this double-act to my
students. Be coolly tenacious. As a frequent speaker on innovation to exec-
utive audiences, I have sought to explain the dual nature of innovation that
so often frustrates managers. From the corporate point of view, I submit,
innovation is too often viewed as merely a distraction—until it pays off. A
busy workday is already so filled with urgent tasks that innovative ideas
tend to get brushed off and pushed aside until the “real work” gets done. It
is the capacity to entertain such distraction that will eventually pay off for
a truly resilient company.
As a cofounder and president of a California-based nonprofit,
Innovation Democracy, Inc., I have practiced extreme innovation (innova-
tion in extreme conditions) together with Sari Stenfors of the Silicon Valley
and Jaak Treiman of Los Angeles: supporting local innovation and entre-
preneurship in countries such as Afghanistan that are important to world
stability. Innovation Democracy specializes in making the impossible possi-
ble, one student and one venture at a time. Most recently, a number of our
graduates visited the Silicon Valley and observed: “For us, this is like visit-
ing Second Life,” so different are the conditions in Afghanistan compared
to those in the Silicon Valley. Innovation Democracy requires such resilience
so that everyone’s innovations can have their chance.
This book draws on my experiences in different spheres of life and work
around the world. It is written to an audience of reflective practitioners and
practice-inspired academics—people with whom I have conversed for a
long time. Many of my colleagues are coauthors of the works included here.
I very much appreciate your thoughtfulness, as well as the inspiration and
joy that I have gained working with all of you.
The book offers a three-step strategy to creating a resilient organization.
First, manage the consequences of past performance. Second, build
resilience into the organization. Third, rehearse resilience enough so that it
becomes second-nature so that your organization can thrive on resilience
even when strategy, occasionally and inevitably, fails. The hardest part of