Resilience is one of the terms we are hearing most often these days…. Those organisations who have recently emerged from some of their most difficult years, are looking to build both strength and agility for their future.
But how can we balance the need for strength with the flexibility required for agility? And what are the capabilities that lead to becoming a resilient organisation?
Someone well placed to answer this question is Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management at London Business School, author of “The Shift” and founder of the Hot Spots Movement – now a global community of more than 500 leaders from 90 of the world’s most influential companies in the Future of Work Research (FoW) Consortium. Lynda was at IMI yesterday sharing insights from her new book “The Key – How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems” We took the opportunity to ask her for her advice to business, in just six words.
IMI: Based on your current work, if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
LG:
Prepare your organisation.
Build resilience today.
IMI: What does this really mean?
LG: Resilience and the ability to be strategically agile starts with what happens inside a corporation.
It involves the ability to understand the key trends impacting businesses worldwide and to be able to respond to these to remain dynamic, innovative and competitive.
There are three areas that your business can look at to make itself more resilient:
- how intelligence and wisdom is amplified: how the organisation builds inner resilience through emotional and interpersonal strengths and supports
- how vitality is enhanced: how the organisation builds social resilience by anchoring itself in the community within which you operate
- how social connections are harnessed: how the organisation meets global challenges by applying your distinctive intellectual capital
Resilient corporations are those that reach out to anchor themselves in their neighbourhood and supply chain. Once they have done that it is then that they are able to leverage their core capabilities such as innovation and scaling to address the challenges of the world.
IMI: Where should we go to learn more?
Follow me on Twitter @lyndagratton. You can find further articles and updates http://www.lyndagratton.com/ and in my new book The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems available from 9th June. The Hot Spots Movement team are at http://www.hotspotsmovement.com/ or follow them on Twitter @HspotM.
