Page 16 - The Resilient Organization

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In 2003, the strategy professor and consultant Gary Hamel and I called for
resilience to become a “quest” for corporations. We defined resilience as a
capacity to undergo deep change without or prior to a crisis. Since then,
enormous amounts of wealth have been lost in a global financial crisis. New
urgency has been discovered regarding global warming with severe implica-
tions to our lifestyle. In 2003, we did not offer a managerial prescription
guaranteed to “make” companies be resilient. This was to be a matter for
management innovation. Rather than a how-to guide, our Harvard
Business Review article, “The Quest for Resilience,” was a clarion call for
rethinking the principles and premises of management, so as to contrast and
complement organizational hierarchy with a sense of initiative and commu-
nity building. It was also a platform for developing the corresponding man-
agement practices that would make resilience an everyday habit rather than
something to be grasped for only in the moment of crisis. These manage-
ment practices would fill the resilience gap, defined as the world becoming
turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient.
Such management innovation would help replace the “fallen eagles”—
those presumptions of the past that got us into this mess. Perhaps the most
famous such truth passé is evident in Alan Greenspan’s shocking statement:
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations,
specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of pro-
tecting their own shareholders and the equity.” The implication is equiva-
lent to the recognition of suicide bombers as a new security threat. No
longer, it says, can the public interest be protected by relying on people’s
sense of self-preservation and their will to live (or make money).
I call these expired rules we have lived by the “fallen eagles.” They
worked once upon a time—some were even magnificent—but they fly no
more.

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