Resiliency
In a meeting in California last week I had the chance to learn about resiliency. Liisa Välkangas from the Woodside Institute presented how companies can acquire the capacity to change in order to enable themselves to avoid turnarounds. She states in her article “The Quest for Resilience” that “a turnaround is a testament to a company's lack of resilience. A turnaround is a transformation tragically delayed.”
The article lists 4 challenges to address for a company to become change resilient. The first one is that senior managers need to overcome denial. Many changes do not come overnight, they announce themselves one way or the other. But in most cases executives do not want to see it. To keep themselves attuned to change they should visit places where changes happen first, no matter if it is a nanotechnology lab or one of London's trendiest clubs, they should surround themselves with innovators not with self-protecting bureaucrats and they should face the inevitability of strategy decay.
Secondly companies should commit themselves to broad-based, small-scale strategic experimentation. Like Sun did with Java. The start was an experiment, dedicating a handful programers to a project, keeping them away from corporate bureaucracy and see what is coming out. For this purpose they thirdly need to liberate resources. And finally companies need to embrace the paradox between the relentless pursuit of efficiency and the restless exploration of new strategic option.
If you found this interesting you might want to read how we can develop individual resiliency. There is a booklet guiding through 9 areas of development: acceptance of change, continuous learning, self empowerment, sense of purpose, personal identity, personal and professional networks, reflection, skill shifting and your relationship to money.
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07:25PM Dec 08, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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