Page 136 - The Resilient Organization

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Since its founding in the early 1980s, the company had grown fast to reach
a prominent position as one of the most successful consumer retailers in the
United States. Despite occasional hiccups related to double-digit annual
growth, the company had consistently outperformed its competition. Its
CEO, however, felt challenged by the past success that set the investor
expectations beyond the status quo. The notion of resilience—that is, the
capacity to adapt to change in a timely manner (before the need for change
becomes “desperately obvious”) and without first having to undergo a
potentially traumatic and costly crisis (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003)—
appealed to him, as he had read the referenced article. In November 2004,
he stated that his challenge was to ensure that the company would continue
to be successful, even if such a continued success is rare in corporate history.
He saw resilience as offering a potential avenue to tackle the odds.
The company thus embarked on a “quest for resilience” in December
2004. First, as a diagnostic step and in an effort to initiate discussion about
specific resilience impediments, 21 managers were interviewed about their
views on impediments to resilience at the company. The questions ranged
from open-ended ones such as, “What do you believe today potentially
impedes the company’s ability to effectively respond to change?” to specific
questions about cognitive, strategic, organizational, and other barriers to
strategic renewal in their area of responsibility. The responses were eventu-
ally summarized and represented as a Barrier Wall—a set of Legolike bricks
that had a specific barrier written on each brick, forming an impediment
cluster by color. (See the sidebar “Resilience Impediments: A Summary” for
the barrier categories.) The representation became one of the inputs for a
resilience enhancement workshop called the Management Innovation Jam,
as described in the next section.

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