Page 119 - The Resilient Organization

106 Part Three: Step 2. Building Resilience into the Organization

as a response to competitive challenges. To master strategic robustness, the
managerial tasks are the following (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003: 54):

The cognitive challenge: A company must become entirely free of
denial, nostalgia, and arrogance. It must be deeply conscious of what’s
changing and perpetually willing to consider how those changes are
likely to affect its current success.
The strategic challenge: Resilience requires alternatives as well as
awareness—the ability to create a plethora of new options as com-
pelling alternatives to dying strategies.
The political challenge: An organization must be able to divert
resources from yesterday’s products and programs to tomorrow’s.
This doesn’t mean funding flights of fancy; it means building an abil-
ity to support a broad portfolio of breakout experiments with the nec-
essary capital and talent.
The ideological challenge: Few organizations question the doctrine of
optimization. But optimizing a business model that is slowly becom-
ing irrelevant can’t secure a company’s future. If renewal is to become
continuous and opportunity driven, rather than episodic and crisis
driven, companies will need to embrace a creed that extends beyond
operational excellence and flawless execution.

Mastering the cognitive, strategic, political, and ideological aspects of
management increases the company’s capability in strategic renewal that is
forward looking rather than crisis prompted. Such renewal capability can-
not be isolated to any one part of the organization but must be the respon-
sibility of the CEO and everyone else.

Behavioral Robustness

Finally, robustness has interesting behavioral dimensions (or perhaps tenden-
cies to gain power). Padgett & Ansell (1993) study Cosimo de’ Medici and
his rise to power and control of Firenze during Renaissance: “The Medicean
political control was produced by means of network disjunctures within the
elite, which the Medici alone spanned” (p. 1259). It took Cosimo a while to
realize this potential of his network, though (p. 1264). However, Padgett and
Ansell also speak of the multiplicity of behavioral motives that allowed