The Resilient Organization: How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even When Strategy Fails

by Liisa Valikangas

Overview

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A "RESILIENT" ORGANIZATION?

It means you are not a prisoner of past performance, good or bad; you don't rely on the right leader alone for success but build the capability to be resilient into the organization. You constantly rehearse the culture of anticipating and responding to change, and you innovate even when you don't yet need to. You don't just survive, you thrive—amidst challenge and opportunity.

This essential guide, written by a renowned expert in global resilience strategy, shows you how to be smart about success and failure. With these field-testedforward-focused tools, you can:

• SURVIVE SHOCKS AND SETBACKS
• TURN THREATS INTO OPPORTUNITIES
• ANTICIPATE CHANGE BEFORE IT HAPPENS
• ENSURE YOUR SUCCESS IS SUSTAINABLE

As a bonus, the book features Postcards from the Resilient Edge, a powerhouse selection of frontline lessons from leading corporations that demonstrate ways you can marshal skill and master luck to take control of your organization's destiny.

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THE NEW RESILIENCE MOVEMENT

One of the most powerful trends born of the New Recession, resilience has become the operative word for business leaders and entrepreneurs facing an unpredictablemarket. On the forefront of this movement, global innovator and strategy consultant professor Liisa Välikangas has created a step-by-step system of proven survival strategies you can put into action immediately.

Whether you need to bounce back from a downturn, take the fight to new competitors, or change your game plan at a moment's notice, The Resilient Organization shows you how to rethink your current strategies—andrebuild your company’s foundation—using four basic tools . . .

• INNOVATION with high impact and low overhead
• DESIGN that is robust, sustainable, and evolvable
• ADAPTABILITY to changing circumstances
• STRENGTH in the face of adversity

By creating a culture of resilience in your organization, you'll be prepared for any challenge the future might hold. The Resilient Organization's fascinating case studies provide real-world examples of resilience in action: how to recover faster from hardships, how toexperiment on new opportunities in a timely manner, how to avoid repeating bad business decisions, and when to scrap old strategiesthat just don't work anymore. Using the timetested principles of resilience, you can find golden opportunities in any situation—whether it's tough competition, reduced resources, or a roller-coaster market.If you're strategically resilient, you not only survive crises, but you can turn these crises into opportunities.

LIISA VÄLIKANGAS, PH.D., is professor ofinnovation management at the Aalto University School of Economics (formerly Helsinki School of Economics) in Finland. She is the cofounder and president of InnovationDemocracy, a nonprofi t global organization dedicated to supporting local innovation and entrepreneurship. Her research on innovation, strategy, and organization has been published in Harvard Business Review, MIT/Sloan Management Review, and The Wall Street Journal. With Gary Hamel, she coauthored the Harvard Business Review article "The Quest for Resilience" and cofounded the Woodside Institute, a research organization dedicated to advancing management innovation. Professor Välikangas currently divides her time between Helsinki and California.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071663663
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	05/24/2010
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dr. Liisa Välikangas (Helsinki, Finland) is Professor of Innovation Management at Helsinki School of Economics. She was invited to the chair in 2007. Her areas of research are innovation, strategy and global change. Previously, she was Managing Director and Research Director of the Woodside Institute—a professional research organization dedicated to advancing innovative management practice and organizational resiliency – which she founded in 2002 with Gary Hamel. She is also a founder and President of Innovation Democracy, Inc., a nonprofit organization committed to supporting innovative entrepreneurship in countries of importance to world stability.

Her research on innovation, strategy and organizing has been published in Harvard Business Review, MIT/Sloan Management Review, the Wall Street Journal, Long Range Planning, and other leading journals. Beyond her research activities, she regularly gives presentations to executive audiences in public and private forums. She works with a number of leading corporations and governmental organizations in the U.S., Europe and Asia in an advisory capacity.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Note on Personal Resilience ix

Part 1 Why Resilience Now? 1

Chapter 1 The Newly Fallen World Rising: Resilience Reform 5

Chapter 2 Fallen Eagles: Bet on Resilience, Not on Strategy 11

Chapter 3 Parts More Resilient than the Whole 25

Part 2 Step 1. Managing the Consequences of Past Performance 45

Chapter 4 Performance Traps 49

Chapter 5 Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 61

Part 3 Step 2. Building Resilience into the Organization 79

Chapter 6 Why Leadership Matters, but It Is Not Sufficient 83

Chapter 7 Resourceful, Robust, and Adaptive: The Building Blocks of Organizational Resilience 97

Chapter 8 Sisu: Resilience as Inner Strength 111

Chapter 9 Case Study: Resilience in Action-Building Reservoirs for Change 121

Chapter 10 Case Study: Imaginative Thinking in Action-The Case of the ODDsters at AT&T 133

Part 4 Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience 151

Chapter 11 Postcard No. 1 from the Silicon Valley, California: For the Love of It!-The Resilience of Amateurs 155

Chapter 12 Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire: "We Want Our Country Back!"-The Emergence and Resilience of Open Organizing 165

Chapter 13 Postcard No. 3 from San Jose, California: Tempered Radicalism and Management Practices That Stick 181

Chapter 14 Postcard No. 4 from Woodside, California: The Challenge of Inventive Experimentation to Management Research-Or, Who Is Responsible for Developing New Management Practice? 199

Conclusion: Bridging the Resilience Gap 223

Endnotes 231

References 239

Index 259