Page 27 - The Resilient Organization

14 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

implementation alone (for example, Witteloostuijn, 1998). In other words,
don’t bet the company on its current strategy. Rather, consider two other
factors as well.
First, companies need to look at how they manage when strategy is not
yet or no longer performing optimally. Resilience provides the capacity to
sustain strategy change. It is the strength an organization draws on in the
in-between state, when the old strategy is not really working and the new
one is still being developed. What we need to realize is that this in-between-
strategies state is now the dominant mode in most companies! Nokia is seek-
ing to reinvent itself as a software and services company (it is no longer
device focused, though it launched its first notebook, a new device for the
Internet). Microsoft is trying to become an Internet company. General
Electric is seeking rapidly to lessen its dependence on its financial business
and become an imaginative “green” company. British Petroleum was, until
recently, poised to become a company focused on alternative technologies
(“beyond petroleum”). The Finnish paper company UPM is becoming an
energy company. Amazon.com has long been moving toward becoming an
Internet marketplace in which many other product lines in addition to books
are sold. And Starbucks is seeking to return to its roots as a great coffee com-
pany. The prevalence of such frequent transitory states emphasizes the
importance of resilience—the company’s carrying force throughout change.
Second, a lot of strategy literature suggests that great companies fail not
because of something they don’t do but because of something they do too
much: they cannot stop.
Polaroid did not manage to transition from instant photography and
film into digital cameras, despite its having invested in relevant R&D and
making other preparatory moves in digital technology. The company simply
could not give up its heritage in instant film. (Even now, there is an
admirable movement to rejuvenate the old instant photography technology
by Polaroid employees and hobbyists together, as reported by the Financial
Times, August 15, 2009. The “Impossible Project” has drawn modest
investment, but its real mission is “to release new stocks of film before the
last supplies expire” to prevent camera owners’ trashing their cameras
before they will be able to get new film.)
Many companies, just like Polaroid, keep doing what they did well in
the past, long after it is of any commercial value or market relevance—this