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Parts More Resilient than the Whole 29

individuals who built it. Its early leaders Sidney Weinberg, Gus Levy, and
others understood the importance of connections in addition to hard work,
and they did not look down on some occasional ruthlessness and credit tak-
ing. They were highly resilient individuals, and their resilience spilled over
to their company. Indeed, the Sachs family even stepped aside to let Sidney
Weinberg lead the firm back from its Depression disaster: “[‘The Brooklyn
boy’ Weinberg] was smarter and tougher than [the genteel Sachses] were,
and [the Sachses] could not do what had to be done” (Ellis, 2008: 31).
Perhaps due to the constitutive efforts of these early entrepreneurs (and
later statesmen), Goldman Sachs today shows resilience as a company,
emerging strong from the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis. They developed the
company’s capability to be resilient—turning threats such as a financial cri-
sis into growth opportunities. (In March 2009, in the midst of the global
financial turmoil, Goldman Sachs reported a much stronger than expected
quarterly profit of $1.8 billion.)

THE ROLE OF OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE

Let us note the established literature on operational resilience, which stud-
ies the capacity of an organization to sustain threat and accomplish acci-
dent recovery (or avoid accidents in the first place). It is largely a defensive
capability, and it stems from the tradition of engineering (Hollnagel,
Woods, & Leveson, 2006). This tradition has sought to build systems that
are robust despite perturbations (that is, systems that don’t change when
circumstances change). Related management literature proposes organiza-
tional qualities (such as mindfulness) that are crucial for such safety
performance. Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) write about the lessons of highly
reliable organizations: good management practices that apply generally but
especially in the face of unexpected events or emergencies.
Operational resilience is about not succumbing to such discrete events
that will—like California earthquakes—inevitably happen, sooner or later,
bigger or smaller. Operational resilience is also about avoiding human
error—being extra careful in operating the nuclear plant, for example,
despite the evidence that accidents are to some extent part of the normal life
in organizations (Perrow, 1984, 1986) and therefore must be expected. This