Book Review: The Resilient Enterprise

Posted on 2007-12-12 by

Revised on: 2015-09-08

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.