Скачать или смотреть How To Maintain Strategic Flexibility In the Face Of Large Firm Risks

As Hurricane Irma approaches Florida, I discuss how firms maintain strategic flexibility in the face of large catastrophes or risks. I define catastrophes as significant negative outcomes, and risks as the probability of future catastrophes happening. As a professor that studies learning from failure, I have thought about these different terms a lot.

Strategic flexibility is the ability to react to rapidly changing environmental conditions. In my view, there are three essential ways to maintain strategic flexibility:

1. Redundancy. Making sure that you have considerable redundancy—multiple roles/procedures that can perform the same task—built into the system. Redundancy allows an organization to duplicate its efforts. Redundancy is very inefficient when operating conditions are normal, so there is temptation to remove it. However, redundancy allows the organization to maintain operations if there are sudden changes in the environment.

2. Fail-Safe Features. The idea behind fail-safe conditions is that even if there is a catastrophic event, the system is set to default into a steady-state that will not harm the firm. For example, one fail-safe feature might be that operations are simply stopped for a few days, and little is affected by change.

3. Slack resources. Although it may appear that slack resources are similar to redundancy, there is a difference. Redundancies are fixed and cannot change quickly - they are simply activate-able. Slack resources can be redeployed in different ways in response to environmental changes. This strategy could include having an emergency fund, extra employees, or ways to access capital if there is a catastrophe.

Even though these particular strategies are important to the organization, firms have to remember that a tremendous amount of goodwill can be generated during catastrophic events. It is important to help out others that have not planned, or are in peril when catastrophe strikes. This goodwill not only generates external social capital, but it also allows the organizational members to band together and generate internal social capital.

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As a research professor of entrepreneurship, innovation, and business strategy, I discuss topics, such as behavioral science, strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and apply these to my new peer proofreading and editing platform. Topics include the sharing economy, altruism, investing in technology, and bounded rationality. My favorite videos pertain to incentives, goal setting, and learning from failure to drive behaviors such as weight loss, stopping telemarketers, creating novel technologies, and creating new movements.

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