Page 31 - The Resilient Organization

18 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

is room for imagination and insight, serendipity, and luck, as well as
determination, leaves a good strategist an opening. However, heat-of-the-
moment decisions often form a (coherent) strategy only in retrospect.

THE DELAYED SUCCESS OF STRATEGY

Strategy can be understood and practiced as a targeted process of discovery.
In this sense, strategy is meant to both shape and interpret the future. For
such discovery to be helpful, it has to be fast enough to keep up with the
changes in the competitive environment and lucky enough in its exploration
to turn up something strategically worthwhile. The discovery must also be
true to the emerging market opportunities.
Too often, an eventual discovery threatens the existing business model,
which makes the discovery difficult to pursue as a business opportunity—
not always because of arrogance or complacency; usually for much more
mundane reasons.
Daily agendas are already full. It is difficult to change routine behaviors
that sustain the old business models and are cemented in organizational
hierarchy and structures. Doing something out of the ordinary risks embar-
rassment and rejection. There are many good reasons—temptations, even—
to continue as before.
Thus the need for the core resilience of the corporation—while waiting
for the eventual success of the strategy in discovery, then in formulation,
and finally in implementation, to overcome the often persistent commit-
ment to the past. GE, for example, needs such resilience in its current tran-
sition. A preeminent U.S. company, it is in the process of reinventing itself
once more: as an imaginative, sustainable, organic growth company.
Amazon.com has been highly resilient in pursuing its long-term strategy.
Jeff Bezos, its CEO, has often stated that Amazon.com will stay the course,
despite short-term challenges, toward becoming the premier customer-
focused service site on the Internet. Bezos does not waiver in his commitment.
In a BusinessWeek interview (April 17, 2008), he recalled: “I remember one
meeting where one of our executives said to me, ‘So how much are you pre-
pared to spend on Kindle, anyway?’ I looked at him and said, ‘How much
do we have?’”