Page 91 - The Resilient Organization

78 Part Two: Step 1. Managing the Consequences of Past Performance

DIFFERENTIATING SUCCESS FROM SURVIVABILITY

It is important to remember to differentiate success from survivability.
Many people living in developing countries have developed innovative
strategies for survival that may not be successful in any conventional mean-
ing of the term, yet are highly survivable. Similarly, companies that currently
enjoy record performance may wish to inquire about the sources of this
success: how sustainable and adaptive are they? Success tends to induce
belief in the continuity of favorable circumstances and develop trust in the
capacity to react in time and cope with environmental jolts or sudden eco-
nomic shifts. Yet this may be undeserved if it is not yet tested. It is often said
that the resilient organizations should enjoy and even search for hard times
as they are the ones to benefit.
“A company is successful until it is not.” The end of success almost
always comes as a surprise (it comes after denial and blaming momentary
circumstances). AT&T blamed its arch rival’s marketing campaign for the
declining cost of long-distance telephony in the 1990s even though the cost
had been declining since World War II (see the case study in Chapter 8). By
the time the company no longer is successful, it is costly to take corrective
action, and survival may be at risk. (AT&T was acquired by SBC, one of
the baby bells, although the merged company kept the AT&T corporate
name due to its remaining brand value.) Like the ghost town of Bodie, many
once very successful companies, failing to differentiate success from surviv-
ability, manage to maintain only a state of arrested decay (see the sidebar
vignette “In a State of Arrested Decay”).
To survive beyond (the most commendable) bouts of success, it is neces-
sary to build resilience. That is the topic of Part Three.