Today the term resilience, which originally comes from biology and means resistance, has arrived in business or in the management of companies. Resilient systems are flexible systems. You manage to always move between maintenance, reorganization, and growth phase. This succeeds if the creative destruction is anticipated in good time and to a sufficient extent through innovation. 4besnews, if the anticipated innovation occurs too slowly, the system collapses. For companies, it is about recognizing in good time when changes occur from outside or inside in order to be able to act in good time. Ultimately, the resilience of companies should be strengthened in order to reduce their vulnerability to shocks. At this point, we now apply the idea of resilience to strategic management and ask the questions:
What distinguishes companies that seem to be resilient to stagnation, crises, or shocks and possibly even grow in such situations from those that go under as if paralyzed?
F9news, how can companies become more resilient, discover their resilient parts, so to speak, and strengthen them?
Three steps on the way to becoming a resilient company
What concrete paths must now be taken in order to increase the resilience of companies? Which active fields of action increase a company’s resilience? The starting point for the seven steps to resilience is the fact that the creation of corporate values requires strategic initiatives whose concrete implementation leads to positive results.
1. Living strategy
Please note that a strategic initiative must be reflected in the processes in the organization and in the behavior of employees. Otherwise, it remains ineffective.
2. Diversification
Don’t put everything on one horse, diversify! Companies have to constantly scrutinize their portfolio because external changes within the product portfolio can quickly turn “cash cows” into “poor dogs” and the newly developed “stars” (see graphic below) do not even begin to shine because there is no effective sales strategy for these products. The constant review of new markets and products keeps a company awake and allows it to react quickly to unexpected developments. According to a study by the consulting firm Birnbaum entitled “How, USA Companies React to the Economic Crisis” in 2009, more than half of the companies surveyed were directly affected by the crisis, some of them threatening their existence. The majority of companies also see this as a serious obstacle to the implementation of restructuring and development measures.
3. Outside view is important
Businesses need to actively monitor the ecosystems that surround them. Instruments such as environment or stakeholder analysis facilitate innovation and investment decisions and offer a kind of early warning system so that changes can be perceived more quickly. Especially in difficult times, it is a decisive advantage to have an external radar and to react to it. A study by empirical under the title “Effects of demographic change on companies and possible measures to secure the employment of older workers” indicates the phenomenon that the effects of aging are increasingly preoccupying politics, but awareness of the problem for the consequences of demographic change is still not very widespread in most companies.
