Supply Chain Risk. Business Continuity. Transport Vulnerability. Resilience. Articles and papers. Books and book chapters. Reports and whitepapers. And more.
To me, this book by Yossi Sheffi was an eye-opener, not so much for it’s academic value, but for it’s “entertainment” value, “entertainment” as in “stop-you-in-your-tracks-and-make-you-think”-value. Excellently written, The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage does not necessarily provide concrete solutions for your own business, but it showcases how other companies, successfully or not, handled various crisis situations. Sheffi’s analysis of how and why things go wrong or right is spot on and to the point.
Bedtime stories
This is a good story-book, but it’s a story-book with a message. Keep it on your desk at all times, or even better, keep a second copy on your nightstand, and let resilience be the last thought in your mind before falling asleep.
Sheffi’s Disruption profile
There is a figure in ‘the Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage’ by Yossi Sheffi that every supply chain risk manager (or even every CEO for that matter) should take note of: the disruption profile. This is tell-tale illustration of what happens when supply chains are disrupted and businesses are impacted.
Resilient Organisastions
A very similar (i.e. inverted) figure can be seen in Resilent Organisastions, a New Zealand research project designed to assist organisations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events, focussing not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimise the impact of any failures.
Vulnerability of production systems
This figure is not new. Already in 1997, Bjørn Asbjørnslett, a Norwegian researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, used it when he described how to assess the vulnerability of production systems, showing how a resilient system has the ability to adapt in order to regain a new stable position.
Reference
Sheffi, Y. (2005). The Resilient Enterprise – Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Analytics cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Unclassified cookies are cookies that we are in the process of classifying, together with the providers of individual cookies.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Cookies are small text files that can be used by websites to make a user's experience more efficient. The law states that we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site. For all other types of cookies we need your permission. This site uses different types of cookies. Some cookies are placed by third party services that appear on our pages.