ix The true art of strategic resilience is to wake up before such a crisis is upon us. Change before
you have to (saving a great deal of money and pain). Turn threats into opportunities before they have the time to form.
p.3 In 2003, the strategy professor and consultant Gary Hamel and I called
for resilience to become a "quest" for corporations. We defined resilience as a capacity to undergo deep change without
or prior to a crisis.
p.13 While most authors and executives are busy trying to hit upon a strategy for success and then forging
its perpetuation, I propose that a more reasonable preoccupation would be building corporate resilience amid times
of extreme uncertainty, especially when you consider the poor record of strategies actually delivering their (full) promise...
Resilience is the capacity that sustains the business while the strategists are hard at work. It is also the capacity to survive
rare events - unexpected changes... When something unexpected happens... it is resilience we fall back on.
p.14 Resilience provides the capacity to sustain strategy change.
p.18 Strategy can be understood and practiced as a targeted process of discovery.
p.19 resilience... begins by taking timely action before the misfortune has a chance to
wreak havoc
p.20 I define strategic resilience as the capability to turn threats into opportunities
prior to their becoming either... Foundational to such resilience is having the courage to see opportunity where
others see threat.
p.21 resilience is not about having a highly competitive strategy or executing it faithfully. Rather, it's
about the company's capacity to benefit from unlikely events, which could have been threats, and turning them into opportunities.
p.29 Let us note the established literature on operational resilience, which studies the capacity
of an organization to sustain threat and accomplish accident recovery (or avoid accidents in the first place)... This tradition
has sought to build systems that are robust despite perturbations
p.32-33 Sustainability and resilience are related in that they both seek to improve long-term prospects;
sustainability by making choices that lessen the burden the environment must bear, and resilience by developing capacity to
make timely changes before they become too costly... The first and most obvious external test of resilience is competition.
Those that survive a competitive threat are by definition found resilient at a point in time (that of the testing).
p.37 resilience is a matter of long term survival... Therefore, resilience - in the competitive logic -
is a matter of strategy and its consequences
p.40 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).
p.76 Strategic resilience, as a reminder, is the capability to turn threats into opportunities prior to
them becoming either.
p.78 To survive beyond (the most commendable) bouts of success, it is necessary to build resilience.
p.81 Strategic resilience is a capability to take serendipitous, opportune action. It is reminiscent of
Karl Weick's (2000) assertion that "reliability is a dynamic non-event"- constant attention is required to prevent a disaster
or an accident... "... it is the challenge I cannot anticipate, that we need grassroots resilience capability for."
p.100 One way to mitigate risk is to have reserves.
p.102 Options are a way to hedge against uncertainties in the competitive environment... options have value
independently of whether any one option is eventually followed through on or not.
p.103 Constraints, especially resource constraints... are key to innovation. Think of them as boundaries
that incite creativity. In fact, that is how many designers work: the consensus is that the more constraints, the
better the outcome!
p.104-105 When designing systems that are resilient, robustness is called for... The more varied and intense
the challenges the organization can cope with, the more robust it is... robustness is the portfolio of strategies available
for an organization and its capacity to adapt to or resist change to negotiate its future.
p.105 structural robustness is the ability to survive challenge and maintain form... Modularity, or organizational
design that can be broken into separate independent parts, similarly adds to robustness but also to flexibility as one part
can be replaced without other parts being affected.
p.105-106 Strategic robustness is the ability to accommodate change in a timely, non-traumatic way. It is
a dynamic capability that can be judged only over time as a response to competitive challenges.
p.106 A company... must be deeply conscious of what's changing and perpetually willing to consider
how those changes are likely to affect its current success... Resilience requires alternatives as well as
awareness - the ability to create a plethora of new options as compelling alternatives to dying strategies... An
organization must be willing to divert resources from yesterday's products and programs to tomorrow's... it means
building an ability to support a broad portfolio of breakout experiments with the necessary capital and talent... optimizing
a business model that is slowly becoming irrelevant can't secure a company's future. If renewal is to become continuous and
opportunity driven... companies will need to embrace a creed that extends beyond operational excellence and flawless execution.
p.107 "Victory...in chess... means locking in others, but not yourself, to goal-oriented sequences of strategic
play that become predictable thereby"... Robust behavior is keeping the options open
p.107 Organizations seek purposefully to better "fit" their environment
p.108 A case in point, BP, the British energy company, recently reversed course from renewable energy
("beyond petroleum") back to its core oil and gas business. The new CEO, Tony Hayward, suggested in the Financial Times (July
8, 2009: 7) that somehow the company "had lost track of" its business fundamentals - that is, what it is good
at: "finding oil: hight cost investments that can create big increases in value"... BP had invested substantially
in renewable energy... the effort now appeared like a distraction to operational safety. BP's until-then stellar reputation
suffered from a number of industrial accidents. [JLJ - apparently written before the Deepwater horizon disaster
of April 20, 2010. On March 23, 2005 a fire and explosion at BP's Texas City Refinery in Texas City, Texas killed 15
workers and injured 170. So far BP has paid 1.6 Billion to compensate victims. Source: Wikipedia]
p.109 To overcome the syndrome of change (and innovation) being a costly distraction, there
are a few imperatives. One is to manage the exploration of the new. This involves the creation of small-scale experiments
that can be run outside the mainstream management systems and learned from
p.110 the ultimate in adaptive fitness is to be in better shape than is required for the race at
hand. Such resilience build-up is particularly necessary as change rarely comes from the exact direction we expect it from,
and it rarely delivers the results hoped for in the time scale aspired to... Anticipating certain challenges and
preparing for them is one thing; the more challenging aspect of resilience is to be ready for emergent challenges
coming our way. Having resilience in change... is about building resilience even beyond those changes that have been
correctly anticipated.
p.153 The thesis of this book is that our organizations will be required to show resilience of a much greater
degree than before to make it to the future.
p.159 Idealistic amateurs are nothing new of course. Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men tells a story
of a group of amateur inventors, scientists, and manufacturers paving the way for the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Most were nonconformists and freethinkers, who pursued scientific questions out of curiosity...
Amateurs engage in activities they are passionate about. Amateur's today... are predominantly well educated and very informed,
and they have professional skills
p.163, 165 Amateurs have the independence to innovate... Amateurism is most suited for task environments
that require taking risks and making discoveries... amateur creativity and effort bring forth new ideas, as well as playful
energy that animates organizational routines.
p.205 Hacking represents the spirit of continuously and relentlessly chopping a thorny yet meaningful or
worthwhile problem, often through parallel or multiple efforts without the sense that such an effort one day will be finished...
Hacking brings the spirit of individual ownership of problems being worked at - hackers tend to address issues of meaning
to themselves
p.207 Even though inventive methodologies lack scientific status, they should not be discounted as undesirable,
making validation as a quest for knowledge more valuable or at least inherently more respectable than invention.
p.227 Remember, resilience is not a strategy; it is a rehearsal. In fact, it is constant practice.
p.228 Resilience will become something like an automatic process only when companies dedicate
as much energy to laying the groundwork for perpetual renewal as they have to building the foundations for
operational efficiency.
p.229 Resilience needs to become second nature... There is the tiger-on-your-tail kind of need
for resilience... the second need for resilience is the capacity to sustain strategy change. The third kind of resilience
is perhaps the most advanced - it is the opportune: turning threats into opportunities prior to their becoming
either.
