Page 45 - The Resilient Organization

32 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

conform to the existing business model, thus negating its uniqueness or
novel potential.

ORGANIZATIONAL DECLINE

Factors Underlying the Inability to Accomplish Strategy Change
• Strategic obsolescence
• Escalating commitment (to an undesirable course of action)
• Strategic drift
• Management malfunctioning
• Structural inertia
• Incompetence
• Threat-rigidity effect
• Success and/or failure traps

CONSIDER SUSTAINABILITY

In addition to being strategically resilient, another related challenge is
worth naming. Sustainability takes a different view of the challenge of long-
term survival. It is about the benevolence of the environment toward the
company. It is about the company’s amount of vested goodwill, legitimacy,
and friends in the environment it shares. Apple is a good example of a com-
pany that has earned so much customer dedication that it is as much a
movement as a corporation; it could ask its army of followers to do almost
anything and succeed—a huge boon to its future prospects.
How to make the organization more sustainable? This requires thinking
of the company and its community as being a common unit with shared
interests, risks, and goals. Rather than fighting to win at the expense of others’
well-being, sustainability requires actions that acknowledge and seek to
improve the shared fate and the joint lot. For example, as is well known,
open source software practices expect any code improvement (or problem
solved) to be contributed to the benefit of all users as a precondition to
accessing the source code. Sustainability and resilience are related in that
they both seek to improve long-term prospects; sustainability by making