Page 23 - The Resilient Organization

10 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

Even when management is painfully aware of the need for change, the cor-
poration is still often unable to accomplish it. General Motors now wishes
to bring its newly found sense of urgency of going through bankruptcy in
40 days to the new GM (Washington Post, July 10, 2009). The delay in
transforming itself into a presumably viable company came at a cost of $50
billion in taxpayer money. But many highly successful companies often face
the same issue: they cannot reform their operations while they are still per-
forming relatively well. The engine cannot be changed in midflight. The
whole flight plan must be canceled before serious change becomes possible.
Concrete, short-term urgencies override the long-term, and usually
abstract, need for renewal. A lot of management excellence–motivated ink
has been spilled over the balancing of exploitation of the present (earning
revenue) with exploration for the future (building future business), and
there’s still much more to come. However, rather than using this book to try
to overturn the old truth that “one bird in the hand is better than two in
the bush,” I suggest we accept the difficulty of transition and acknowledge
its typically delayed nature despite calls for creative destruction (how to
cannibalize your business now), strategic innovation (compete for the
future), or the innovator’s solution (which stems from the innovator’s
paradox—doing well for today makes it difficult to adjust to the future).
We should not forget the risks either: a strong-headed pursuit of the
unknown is probably good for humankind (we get to learn) but not so good
for the adventurers who eventually pay the price. Niccolò Machiavelli
(1469–1527) already noted that “the benefits to the innovator are uncer-
tain, but the costs to those affected by the changes involved are not.”
In the spirit of the Reaganesque “trust but verify,” let us not abandon
our efforts to reinvent the future (this is the “trust” component), but let us
also survive until the future we work for is here (thus we “verify” the
claimed progress). Luft and Korin [2007: 81 (in Fukuyama, 2007)] suggest
a great need to move from “an oil-based economy to a fuel-choice econo-
my,” but they admit that the move will take time. The question is: What
shall we do in the meanwhile, while this transition slowly rolls along, recov-
ering from many erroneous moves and dead-end paths?
Let us build resilience—to close the gap between the future and our
capability to meet it.