Page 26 - The Resilient Organization

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Simply stated: While most authors and executives are busy trying to hit
upon a strategy for success and then forging its perpetuation, I propose that
a more reasonable preoccupation would be building corporate resilience
amid times of extreme uncertainty, especially when you consider the poor
record of strategies actually delivering their (full) promise (see, for example,
1
“Pop! Went the Profit Bubble,” Fortune, May 4, 2009; also Campbell-
Hunt, 2000). Resilience is the capacity that sustains the business while the
strategists are hard at work. It is also the capacity to survive rare events—
unexpected changes that may be minor (like Apple’s iPod) or major (the
2008 financial crisis). When something unexpected happens, or our
assumptions about likelihoods, causal sequences, and human behavior turn
out wrong, it is resilience we fall back on.

It is difficult to evaluate the quality of strategy independently of its
performance. Can a strategy be “good” despite performing poorly? A
CEO can believe in a strategy that has yet to deliver, but will the
investors? Using performance as a guide to the goodness or fitness of a
particular strategy easily becomes a tautology. Beyond current perform-
ance, a company is as resilient as its ability to survive and thrive over
multiple major changes in its competitive environment. Being resilient
means taking a longer-term perspective.

Most of strategy literature focuses on how to arrive at a winning
strategy. This may require superior customer insight, leadership agility,
innovativeness, or good execution. Yet the record of success through
strategy excellence leaves enough failures to suggest that wise and respon-
sible corporate leadership should not focus on strategy formulation and

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