Page 53 - The Resilient Organization

40 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

Survival Logics
Battle hardy
Strong core (identity)
Resource-scarce survival

PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

It is imperative to assess corporate performance from three perspectives:
strategy relevance, operational efficiency, and corporate resilience. Strategy
relevance is about engaging the people with whom you wish to do business.
Operational efficiency is about the productivity and resource consumption
of such a pursuit. Corporate resilience is about the capacity to survive the
short term while being able to accomplish strategic transformation in the
long term (that is, turn threats into opportunities).

THREE CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CORPORATE PERFORMANCE

1. Strategy relevance: How engaging are you to the people with
whom you wish to do business?
2. Operational efficiency: How productive are you? How efficient is
the effort in terms of resources consumed?
3. Corporate resilience: How often are you able to turn threats into
opportunities before they have become clearly visible?

HUMAN FALLIBILITY AND THE SAMPLE OF ONE

Sadly, the overall human record of resilient action is poor. To quote
Fukuyama (2007: 172):

We can predict with certainty that we will be surprised; we can and
do anticipate an array of catastrophic events. Unfortunately, [. . .] we
can also predict with certainty that when they come, we will be inad-
equately prepared.