To survive today, companies must have organisational resilience

Organisational resilience is the ability to survive a?crisis & thrive in a world of uncertainty. Resilience is a strategic capability. It is more than just about getting through crises.

A truly resilient organisation has 2 important capabilities - the foresight & situation awareness to prevent potential crises emerging & an ability to turn crises into a source of strategic opportunity.

Organisational Resilience is an earnings driver. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft & Facebook are leaders in their?industries because they anticipated existing market needs & created new markets by understanding their internal & external corporate environments. They were able to anticipate & catalyze market change & adapt before it became fully realized by the rest of the market. They were not reactive to changes, like their competitors, instead, they were proactive. Their?risk appetite, drive for innovation & ability to self-disrupt were integrated into their organisational objectives & vision of the future, allowing them to proceed with confidence into the future of their industry.

Companies cannot expect to be around forever. Just look at the list of Fortune 500 companies in 1955 & 2020. In those 65 years, only 52 companies appear on both lists. About 90% of the Fortune 500 companies from 1955 have gone bankrupt, merged or shrunk. The average tenure on the Fortune 500 list was 33 years in 1965, 20 years in 1990 & will likely shrink to 14 years by 2026. Every Fortune 500 CEO should know that there is a 50% chance that their firm might disappear from the list during the next decade. The most important principle a leader must embrace is that nothing is forever.

The expression “fighting the last war” describes the folly of using old strategies when fighting today's battles. In this age of digitization & artificial intelligence, the biggest threat to an organization is not necessarily a competitor. Every business is vulnerable to obsolescence that might come from evolving technology &/or globalization. Digitization has changed the rules of competition, making it very easy for rival firms to emerge from anywhere. Digitization often lowers entry barriers, causing long established boundaries between sectors to tumble. Agile leaders can encourage innovation & experimentation & create a culture of creativity; they know when something is not working & can move on to something else. Organizations that succeed will have a flexible, futuristic leader who understands the importance of agility & speed, & knows when to change course.

Sears, Toys “R” Us & other major retailers did not recognize the threat a small online bookstore founded in 1995 posed. Sears, with billions of dollars of sales from its mail-order catalogs, ultimately filed for bankruptcy with a diminishing footprint presence in the retail community because it lacked the vision & agility to do what Amazon did.

The ability to improvise on the fly are now fundamental skills if organizations are to succeed in this volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous (VUCA) world. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is constantly trying new ideas because he believes that doing things at high speed is the best defense against the future.

Leadership selection & development must be focused on identifying talent with critical thinking skills, the ability to innovate, a passion for lifelong learning, resourcefulness & adaptability. Employees must also possess the ability & willingness to adapt to changing business conditions. Most companies still have a mindset oriented to economies of scale. They are not organized for continuous innovation. This explains their difficulty with competing in an economy that demands creativity.

The coronavirus pandemic has shown what happened to companies or industries that lack organizational agility & responds slowly to threats. Industries that have been devastated by COVID-19 include retail, gambling, hotel, airline, movie theater, live sports, cruise, film production, automaking, theme parks, fitness, construction & transportation.

Companies that survive will have to be resilient, agile & innovative. They need agile leaders who have the courage & ability to change course quickly, make fast decisions. Organizations should not fall into the competency trap, which means that an organization becomes so good at one thing, it cannot learn to do anything new. Complacency is a disaster for any organization. It is admittedly very difficult to move to an agile operation model, but it must be done for the sake of survival.

A silo mentality is the adversary of organizational agility as is too much bureaucracy. A silo mentality occurs when groups or different departments in an organization refuse to share knowledge. Capable corporate leaders dismantle silos because it breeds tribalism. Overly large organizations often find themselves with rigid silos & are consumed with turf battles which is not the way to create organizational agility. To succeed in today’s economy, people from different departments must collaborate & share information.?

Security as an afterthought is suicidal when organizations are deeply interconnected with partners, customers & suppliers. Organizations can no longer just ‘consult’ the security team or ask for isolated input after initiatives are well underway. Reducing fragmentation & friction with security by fostering collaboration & clarity & integrating security into business processes can deliver the scale & insights needed to strengthen the organization’s collective resilience, recovery & response capabilities. This level of integration requires companies to embrace security by design, consider risk & security from the inception of every initiative throughout the organization.

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Endro Sunarso is an expert in Security Management, Physical Security & Counter Terrorism. He is regularly consulted on matters pertaining to transportation security, off-shore security, critical infrastructure protection, security & threat assessments, & blast mitigation.

Besides being a Certified Protection Professional (CPP?), a Certified Identity & Access Manager (CIAM?), a Project Management Professional (PMP?) & a Certified Scrum Master (CSM?), Endro is also a Fellow of the Security Institute (FSyl) & the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (F.ISRM).

Endro has spent about 2 decades in Corporate Security (executive protection, crisis management, critical infrastructure protection, governance, business continuity, loss mitigation, due diligence, counter corporate espionage, etc). He also has more than a decade of experience in Security & Blast Consultancy work, initially in the Gulf Region & later in South East Asia.