Category Archives: BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS

Posts inspired by books I have read

Appetite versus Attitude

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Revised on: 2015-09-20

Finally, and long overdue, another review in the Gower Short Guide to Business Risk book series. This is the 7th book I’m covering, and I must say that the main topic of Risk Appetite versus Risk Attitude has brought a whole new perspective on risk and risk management to my attention. Basically, what the books states is that every company should ask themselves two questions: 1) How much risk do we want to take? That is risk appetite. 2) How much risk do we think we should take? That is risk attitude. There are actually 4 more questions, dealing with risk propensity, risk capacity, risk perception and risk exposure that make up the risk management framework presented in this book.

Risk management – difficult or easy?

Risk management, so the authors, is a way of understanding the trade-offs we are making when we decide a course of action, not only in the short-term, but more importantly, in the long term, because a long-term perspective helps in making strategically consistent decisions time and again, instead of simply listening go your gut feelings. Understanding your risk appetite, and your risk attitude, lays the groundwork for making good decisions in uncertain yet important situations.

Who says what?

An interesting feature of the book is a whole chapter dedicated to collecting the views on risk appetite from regulators, standards bodies like, professional associations and consultants, clearly showing that there is a lot of debate about risk appetite, but no consensus.

Risk appetite risk tolerance, risk attitude and risk profile are mentioned by the regulators, but appear to be the same. Risk appetite is mentioned in standards, but not always well defined. Professional associations  do fare a bit better; at least they do show some guidance in how to express risk appetite in a useful way. Consultants, seeing business opportunities in helping confused managers, have produced a wide range of white papers on risk appetite.

Although there is some common thinking among all these sources, there is little agreement and no agreed-upon definition. The list of 24 different definitions taken from these sources definitely shows that. However, so the authors claim, two strands of thought are common in these definitions, risk as a level or threshold that should not be crossed, and risk as a willingness to cross that same threshold, i.e. how much risk do we think we should take and how much risk do we want to take respectively.

Appetite versus attitude

The authors spend a whole chapter on describing and discussing appetite and attitude, their differences and similarities, perhaps a bit too much in my view, but the message sinks in finally:

Risk appetite: Tendency of an individual or group to take risk in a given situation.

Risk attitude: Chose response to a given risky situation, influenced by risk perception.

While this makes perfect sense when reading it the first time, the second time I ask myself, what is “risk” in risk appetite, and what are “risky situations” in risk attitude? Nit-picking, perhaps, and quickly forgotten, because their next point is rather brilliantly explained:

So when we face a risky and important situation and we need to decide how much risk to take […] we could just go with our gut, and make an intuitive decision [..] that might lead to a good outcome. But i might not. This is where is risk attitude comes in, allowing us to chose an appropriate positioning towards the risk.

Risk appetite comes from the heart, or rather, gut, whereas risk attitude comes from the head. Simple as that.

Risk elements at play – inputs and outcomes

The perhaps most difficult part of the book is the chapter that puts all risk elements together:

Risk propensity: How much risk do we usually like to take?
Risk appetite:  How much risk do we want to take?
Risk capacity: How much risk can we take?
Risk perception: How much risk do we think we are taking?
Risk attitude: How much risk do we think we should take?
Risk exposure: How much risk are we actually taking?

Inputs to risk appetite and risk attitude and their respective outcomes are then used to construct what the authors call the RARA-model.

What I noticed here is that risk actions are outcomes of risk attitude, not risk appetite. Risk appetite on the other hand sets the risk threshold, against which risk actions and the resulting residual risk should be checked against. They way I interpret this is that risk attitude has a lower risk level than than risk appetite, and risk attitude should be the guiding principle for risk actions, not risk appetite.

Risk attitude and risk appetite exemplified

Half the book is devoted to a number of convincing examples of how the RARA-model can be used in practice in making well-informed risk decisions. In doing so, the authors use three kinds of scenarios: Unmanaged, Constrained and Informed Scenario.

Unmanaged, where risk thresholds are set by the organisation with no conscious or intentional reference to risk appetite or risk attitude.

Constrained, where risk thresholds are consciously modified by an understanding of the inherent risk appetite.

Informed, taking into account the chosen risk attitudes of key stakeholders as well as wider organisational factors when setting risk thresholds.

The beauty of these different scenarios is that they make use of the above elements in the RARA-model in very different ways, demonstrating how everything comes into play.

Conclusion

At first glance the RARA-model appears unnecessarily complex, and the case examples, using every single element of the model, are very elaborated. However, what the model really is all about is answering the six questions above. I like this book, but it takes a while to sink in, especially for someone like me, who uses the ISO 31000 standard extensively in my daily work.

Reference

Murray-Webster, R. and Hillson, D. (2012) A Short Guide to Risk Appetite. Farnham: Gower Publishing.

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Resilience times four

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Revised on: 2015-09-20

Resilience. It is not so much about reducing the number of things that go wrong, but it is about improving the number of things that go right. So says Erik Hollnagel in the opening prologue of  Resilience Engineering in Practice, a book he co-edited with several others. To me this means that resilience thinking turns risk management thinking on its head, and resilience engineering, so Hollnagel, rests on responding, monitoring, anticipating and learning. In that order. But why are these four elements so crucial to resilience?

Risk matrix and risk management redefined

What Hollnagel means is that the ability to respond to events, the ability to monitor ongoing developments, the ability to anticipate future threats – and importantly, future opportunities, and that the ability to learn from past failures and successes is what makes a business resilient, or an organisation, or society for that matter.

Personally, I have always seen the learning part as important to resilience, much like Liisa Välikanga wrote in her book on The Resilient Organization. But where Välinkanga focusses on an organisation that is innovative, robust, adaptable and strong, an organization that is engaged, competitive and strives for success, Hollnagel focusses on an organisation that is, well, uhm…resilient? Just  that, simple and beautiful.

Hollnagel’s range of outcomes

Hollnagel relinquishes the good old risk matrix, because he thinks it is too concerned with the negative and too concerned with what we fear. The risk matrix perspective tends to overstate the importance of preparing for worst-case scenario, instead of looking at how the world really is. Normally, things go right, very right, even if they start out wrong. Therefore, he describes a new model, that includes the positive side as well, and that takes into account the full range of outcomes to any situation.

Four possible outcomes

Hollnagel divides the outcomes into four possibilities:

Positive outcomes that have a high probability – things that not only go right, but that are also intended to go right.

Positive outcomes that have a low probability – things that happen, not because they were meant to happen, but they just happened, sometimes out of sheer luck.

Negative outcomes with a low probability – things that go wrong, often unexpected, but less often unimaginable, and more often than not with dire consequences.

Negative outcomes with a high probability – things that go wrong, which must realistically (or statistically) be expected to happen, however, usually without serious consequences.

In my opinion, this way of looking at the world not only  makes us spend less efforts on preventing low-probability-high-consequence events, or Black Swans as Nassim Taleb calls them. Instead it enables us to spend more efforts on making things go right and looking at why and how things go right.

This point of view is essential to resilience engineering. According to Hollnagel, in Resilience Engineering sees”things that go wrong” as the flip side of “things that go right”, assuming that hey are the result of the same underlying process.

It therefore makes as much senses to try to understand why things go right as to understand why they go wrong. In fact it makes much more sense because there are many more things that go right than wrong. Resilience Engineering argues that it is necessary to look at success as well as at failures precisely in order to understand why things go wrong. There are no fundamental differences between performance that leads to failure and performance that leads to success.

Hollnagel defines resilience as

the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions

and argues that this definition emphasises the ability of the system to function under both expected and unexpected conditions, not just to avoid failure or withstand adversity. Hence, it is wiser for an organisation to do more things right than to do less things wrong. Learning from success, not learning from failure, is the key to sustaining any business.

Four cornerstones of resilience

In my previous post on vulnerability and resilience in transport networks I already mentioned them. Today I will examine them one-by-one:

Knowing what to do, that is, how to respond to regular and irregular disruptions and disturbances, either by a prepared set of measures or by adjusting normal functioning. This is the ability to address the actual.

Knowing what to look for, that is, how to monitor that which is or can become a threat or in the near term, both in the environment and in the system itself. That is the ability to address the critical.

Knowing what to expect, that is, how to anticipate developments, threats and opportunities further into the future, such as potential changes, disruptions, pressures and their consequences. That is the ability to address the potential.

Knowing what has happened, that is, how to learn from experience, in particular how to learn the right lessons from the right experiences – successes as well as failures. That is the ability to learn.

This figure illustrates how the cornerstones work together:

Hollnagel’s four cornerstones of resilience

Critique

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on this, but Hollnagel states that resilience engineering must look at both sides of the coin, things that go right and things that go wrong. I can see that in the first cornerstone, what to do, and the fourth cornerstone, what has happened. In the second cornerstones it is missing. I for one would say that that what to look for should not only include near term threats, but also long-term opportunities. However, it does seem to appear in the third cornerstone, what to expect, where opportunities is mentioned.

Conclusion

This is a brilliant discussion of what resilience is all about. I must admit that I haven’t read all the other chapters in the book,yet this introduction stands out as a marvel in explaining in simple words what the core issue is. Nothing here that is “academically interesting, but practically totally irrelevant”, as I like to say about some research. This is not only academically sound, it is also practically sound, and I look forward to putting this into practice in my line of work.

Reference

Hollnagel, E. (2011) Prologue: the scope of resilience engineering. In: Hollnagel, E., Dédale, J.P., Woods, D., Wreathall, J. (Eds.) Resilience Engineering in Practice: A Guidebook. Ashgate, pp. xxix–xxxix.

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Book Review: Your Research Project

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Revised on: 2015-09-06

This book is a must-have for any serious student or budding research. Even if you consider yourself a seasoned researcher, this book could still teach you some tricks. Now in its third edition, the book will guide through how to write about your research, it will also take you through uthe various research methods, how to make a really good literature review, and it will teach you about honesty and ethics. It is a short, compact and comprehensive guide, better than most other how-to guides on research that I have read.

Did it help me?

Browsing through unfinished work on my blog I found a post draft meant to be a review of this book, dating back to October 2009, a draft I left and never returned to continue, not until now. I have no idea why I never finished that post, because the book did indeed help in me in my own research. At the time I was still aiming for a PhD, a path I have since abandoned. Or maybe not, who knows? Anyway, I did make good use of the tips and tricks the book provided me with, and I did use it when making my philosophical essay on Transportation Network Reliability and Vulnerability back in 2004, when I still believed that my PhD was not too far away.

Structure, structure, structure

The book emphasises that research is based on structure and logic. Now wonder that each chapter is like a small research project or paper in itself, with aims, introduction, content, conclusion, next steps and further reading. Tedious at first, but once you get the hang of it, you start to realise that this is indeed the way research should be conducted. The book teaches by example how to do research. I think that is what makes this such a brilliant book to have and read and put to use.

Reference

Walliman, N. (2011) Your research project, 3rd ed. Sage Publications, London UK

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What are Logistics Clusters?

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Revised on: 2015-09-02

This is a guest post by Professor Yossi Sheffi, Director, MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics

Many global supply chains benefit from the operational flexibility and distribution efficiencies provided by logistics clusters, yet we have a relatively poor understanding of these vital nodes. This lack of knowledge is even more pronounced when the broader economic benefits are considered.

One of the main motivations for writing my new book Logistics Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth (MIT Press, October 2012), is to shed light on the crucial role played by logistics clusters in supply chain management and international commerce.

Logistics clusters are communities of companies that come together to share logistics expertise and know how. They can be found in most countries, often near consumer markets or within ports and airports. And they play host to a wide range of enterprises including the logistics arms of enterprises, third-party logistics services providers, distribution companies, and freight carriers.

In the loop

What advantages attract companies to these agglomerations? There are quite a few, not only for supply chain managers but also for the regions where these communities are located and for the global economy.

First, the growth of logistics clusters is self-reinforcing. They are the focal point of large volumes of freight, making it possible to achieve economies of scale and scope. Carriers and shippers use these gains to reduce the number of empty backhauls by identifying opportunities to pick up follow-on loads. And they exploit the scale of cluster-related freight activities by deploying larger conveyances to move freight and achieve higher vehicle utilization. Moreover, as the freight volumes in and out of logistics clusters grow, transportation service levels improve due to higher frequencies and more direct operations.

More efficient cargo flows lead to lower transportation costs and higher service levels, which attract additional companies to the cluster, creating a positive feedback loop. Further, by raising the efficiency bar they promote global growth, which increases the demand for cluster-based services and stimulates further trade growth.

Additionally, logistics clusters offer advantages based on the interchangeability of transportation and logistics assets. Since equipment such as rail cars, containers, trailers, and airplanes come in standard sizes and shapes, it can be shared by the community. The same goes for the logistics expertise that resides within these groupings. Sharing resources in this way enables the incumbents to withstand the variations in freight flows associated with the industries they serve.

A model for job creation

A powerful attribute – and one that is generally underestimated – is the ability of logistics clusters to create jobs. The port of Rotterdam employs 55,000 people directly and 90,000 indirectly. Los Angeles County supports more than 360,000 jobs in logistics. The Memphis International Airport in the U.S. is responsible for supports 220,000 jobs in the local economy, 95% of which are tied to cargo operations. In fact, more than one in three jobs in the Memphis area linked to the airport.

As I explain in the book, the employment opportunities in logistics clusters are wide ranging. There are blue collar jobs in areas such as warehousing, white collar positions in IT, customer service, and management, and work associated with value-add activities including light manufacturing and repairs. In its Louisville Worldport hub, UPS employs hardware technicians to repair Toshiba laptops, for instance.

These jobs are difficult to offshore, and not tied to the performance of a single industry. The late-stage customization of products that is carried in many clusters needs to be located in close proximity to end markets. In addition, the economics of transportation dictate that clusters should not be located too far from customers.

In many cases logistics clusters are also building highly valuable expertise in environmental sustainability. These freight hubs make it possible to improve vehicle utilization rates and to deploy larger conveyances, which lower the carbon footprints of supply chains.

The pitfalls

Logistics clusters also have a number of downsides that users should be aware of. Some local communities resent the noise, heavy traffic, and pollution that come with logistics clusters. In April 2012, a German court upheld a ban on night flights in Frankfurt Airport that restricts freight operations in the hub, for instance.

These entities are vulnerable to the economic downturns and geopolitical risks that are part and parcel of global trade. Rising energy prices and protectionist trade measures can undermine the viability of logistics clusters. Their competitiveness can also be affected by technological change. The port of Singapore, for instance, is investing in cranes that lift four containers simultaneously, making port operations faster and more efficient.

It should also be noted that not every logistics cluster is a success story; flawed decision making and inadequate resources can impede their development. Locations that initially appeared to be a perfect fit turn out to be less favorable. An example is Port Said at the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, which has not developed into the major global logistics hub envisaged by its creators.

Global competition is another factor to consider. Take for example, the expansion of the Panama Canal and the developing logistics clusters along the canal. This raises the competitive stakes on three fronts. First, there will be competition with transshipment ports in the Caribbean, Secondly, ports along the Atlantic Coast of the US and Latin America will compete to handle the larger container ships that the enlarged canal will attract. And thirdly, competition with other, non-canal routes is expected, specifically between the canal and the US Pacific Coast and rail combinations.

Bright future

Will these threats stymie the growth of logistics clusters? I think not. Trends such as globalization will continue to fuel the expansion of these communities. Indeed, as I argue in my book, more investment in logistics clusters is taking place in developing countries, notably China. Several European countries including Germany and the Netherlands are busy attracting logistics operations. Other countries should pay more attention to building and developing logistics clusters, so they can reap the full benefits that these remarkable communities have to offer.

Reference

Sheffi, Y. (2012). Logistics Clusters. MIT Press.

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Other books reviewed by husdal.com


Supply Chain Continuity

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Many business owners will have come across the term business continuity, and many supply chain owners will have come across the term supply chain risk management. However, the term supply chain continuity is still a rather unexplored topic, gathering mere 45000 search results on Google, while business continuity has no less than 10 million results. But isn’t that what supply chain risk management is all about, namely supply chain continuity? Well, here’s a book that most certainly thinks so: A Supply Chain Management Guide to Business Continuity by Betty A Kildow, showing how a well-functioning supply chain is the key to a well-functioning business.
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SC Design and Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-01

More than 500-page heavy and laden with real-life examples and thoroughly calculated details, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain by David Simchi-Levi, Philip M Kaminsky and Edith Simchi-Levi this an excellent textbook that will teach you much more than just supply chain design and management. This book takes on a unique approach, and teaches you how the supply chain is an integrated part of any business, not something added to it to make the business work. The supply chain is the business; if it is not properly designed and managed, there is no business. Thus, this book is more than just about supply chain management, it is about business management in a wider sense. Unfortunately though, supply chain risk does not feature very prominently in this book.

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The Resilient Organization

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

What does it mean to be a resilient organization? That is the topic of  The Resilient Organization, written by Liisa Välikangas and subtitled How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even when Strategy Fails. Here, resilience is more than just the ability to meet adversity; resilience as Välikangas sees it, is an essential element of a company’s competitive advantage, consisting of innovation, design or structure, adaptability and strength. Blending academic research and managerial insights this book provides a different look at resilience from a perspective that is quite different from the usual definition of resilience as a mostly operational attribute.

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Low Cost Country Sourcing

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Low-cost countries. A dream for some and a nightmare for other others. What are typical supply chain risks in low-cost countries and how can they be managed? That is the topic of the PhD dissertation by Holger Köhler, now available as a book: Supply Chain Risiken im Low Cost Country Sourcing: Reduktion von Lieferrisiken in China und der Türkei. In the book, which is a more or less unabridged version of his dissertation, Holger Köhler not only presents a (new) system for the systematization of supply chain risks, he also develops a model for the factors that influence supplier risk and he exemplifies the cause and effect of supplier risks in China and in Turkey.

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SME Risk Management

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Revised on: 2015-11-12

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up the majority of enterprises in most countries, and thus often play a considerable role in supply chains, yet they often lag behind in implementing effective risk management practices. For SMEs, the establishment of a risk management system is essential to their survival and their business continuity, and a potential supply chain partner may also want to assess the proper implementation of a risk management system before engaging in a relationship. That is why Thomas Henschel wrote Risk Management Practices of SMEs. Evaluating and Implementing Effective Risk Management Systems, where he provides precise recommendations for the implementation of an effective risk management in SMEs.

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Book Review: Ethical Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-04

This is – for the time being – the sixth and final review of the books in the Gower Short Guides to Business Risk Series, since so far, only 6 out of  13 have been published. The last one out for review on husdal.com is A Short Guide to Ethical Risk, written by Carlo Patetta Rotta. Corporate social responsibility is growing in importance, and this is a book that provides an overview of the theories of ethics that bear on today’s business world. It is also a book that describes the adoption of appropriate company cultures and corporate governance models, and it is a book that discusses the selection and retention of ethically sound staff and implementation of fair incentive systems.  It is a book for companies wishing to survive into the future, simply because developing effective protection against exposure to ‘ethical risk’ is the only possible way forward. Well, not the only possible way, but the only viable way.

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Book Review – Fraud Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-04

Last year I was approached by Gower Publishing and invited to review their Short Guides to Business Risk Series, a task I happily agreed to do since most of the topics covered in the series directly or indirectly link up with supply chain risk, which is what I mainly blog about.  It’s been a while since the last review, but here I go again, and the latest book on my nightstand this time is A Short Guide to Fraud Risk, co-written by Martin Samociuk,  Niger Iyer and Helenne Doody. It is a fascinating book, showing how easy it may be for employees, customers, clients and consultants to commit fraud, and how easy it may be to prevent this. It is a book that anyone working in procurement or supply chain management should read and ponder.

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Book Review: Political Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Egypt is in crisis. After Tunisia, now Egypt is rocked by a popular uprising, and the outcome of the so far peaceful protests is still uncertain. This unstable and developing political situation has brought me the perhaps perfect background for today’s book review: A Short guide to Political Risk by Robert McKellar. Every firm with a supply chain that sources globally or operates internationally is exposed to political risks that may be very different from what they are used to domestically, where political risks often limit themselves to de-regulations and re-regulations of business sectors, tax cuts or tax hikes or sudden environmental measures or security enforcements following major events or changes in government. On the international scene such and  perhaps even worse changes can come abruptly and without warning, not because they cannot be foreseen, but because the firm usually lacks the tools and the knowledge it needs to anticipate and react coherently to political risks.
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Supply Chain Nirvana

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Revised on: 2015-09-16

Is there something like a Supply Chain Nirvana, where it all comes together and where a firm’s supply chain  is perfectly aligned with its business strategy, thus creating the competitive advantage the firms needs to stay ahead of its rivals? Vivek Sehgal may have found the recipe in his latest book, Supply Chain as Strategic Asset. In this tightly packed 300-page volume Sehgal shows how important it is to have a top-down-driven approach to supply chain management and how important it is to link strategy and execution, from the board room to the  very last delivery guy.  The supply chain is a firm’s core asset, and perhaps its most important asset, and a firm is only as good or as bad as its supply chain. While a bit overwhelming at first, this book is filled with many important real-life lessons, and K-Mart versus Wal-Mart seems to be one of Sehgal’s favorite subjects.

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Book Review: Operations Rules

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Revised on: 2011-07-14

Operations Rules by David Simchi-Levi comes with an ambiguous title. You can read this two ways: 1) Operations Management (over)rules Supply Chain Management or 2) The Rules of (Business) Operations Management. Either way, this is an excellent book with a broad scope. Most importantly perhaps, it contains an extensive chapter on managing supply chain risk, something that is very rare in the average book on supply chain management. That should not come as a surprise, however, because this is not an average book. It is one of the most applicable and practically oriented books on supply chain operations that has come across my desk in recent times.
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Book Review: Customs Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

International trade and global supply chains are filled with goods that are criss-crossing the globe and international borders many times on their way from the supplier to the end customer. Customs is perhaps the most important element that facilitates these cross-border movements, and for businesses, failing to comply with customs requirements may result in delayed shipments and serious disruptions in the supply chain.  That is why managing customs risk is an integral part of managing global supply chain risks, but customs risks are unfortunately absent from much of the supply chain risk literature. A Short Guide to Customs Risk by Catherine Truel deals exclusively with this topic and after reviewing it I think that it should be required reading for anyone dealing with supply chain risk. That said, customs risk is perhaps more of a logistics risk than a supply chain risk.

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Risk Management Simplified

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Revised on: 2011-07-05

Risk management. Why make it difficult when you can make it easy? That is perhaps what Andy Osborne thought when he wrote his most recent book, Risk Management Simplified. The cover says that is is “A practical, step-by-step guide to identifying and addressing risks to your business”, and it doesn’t come much more practical than this. This is a handbook and a self-assessment tool that leaves practically no risk uncovered. It’s practical, well-illustrated, to the point, not academic at all, filled with case examples and easy to work with. In this post, I will take a closer look at the book, because despite it’s simplicity, it does hold a couple of hidden gems worth mentioning.

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Book Review: Reputation Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Reputation. Not only is it practically impossible to measure, its value is also frequently underestimated. Anything that can devalue your reputation is a reputation risk, and reputation risk and supply chain risk go hand in hand. Why? Because whatever happens in your supply chain may affect your reputation, and what affects your reputation will ultimately affect your business. A short Guide to Reputation Risk by Garry Honey describes how  difficult it is to build a reputation, and how easy it is to destroy, how it can be measured, how it can be managed, what drives it and how different stakeholders focus on different aspects of reputation, and how reputation risk management is an integral part of overall risk management. All this is packed into one small book.

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Book Review: Procurement Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-04

“Do yo like living dangerously? Then you should read this book. It exposes you to over seventy types of risk you  you can take in your business life.” Those are the opening words of the most recent book on my night stand.  Written by Richard Russill, the title Procurement Risk is perhaps misleading, as this book risk is just as much about supply chain risk or enterprise risks in general. In fact,  the book makes a strong argument for procurement risk management being just a short step away from business continuity management. Not only will this book help procurement professionals to lift their head from their desks and gain a wider perspective on possible ramifications of their purchasing decisions, it will also help top managers to seeing procurement as a crucial contributor to a company’s well-being and competitive advantage.

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Supply Chain Logistics Risk in Germany

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

What are the most common supply chain and logistics risks that businesses and logistics providers have to deal with? Here is a study that provides the most complete answer to that question that I have seen to date. Risikomanagement in der Supply Chain – Status Quo und Herausforderungen aus Industrie-, Handels- und Dienstleisterperspektive by Hans-Christian Pfohl, Philipp Gallus and Holger Köhler is a meticulous study from Germany that speaks for itself in describing which risks that have which probability and which impact among businesses and among logistics providers. Note that I use supply chain and logistics risks. That is because this study separates business risks from logistics providers risk, and that is a novel approach I haven’t seen too often.

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Organizing Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Resilience. A word that his been in the media perhaps more than ever before these days. I am of course thinking about the rescue of the Chilean miners and how it was possible for them to survive and emerge almost unaffected (as many of them seemed to be) after being trapped underground for 69 days. How is it possible that they adjusted and almost thrived in their adversity? Resilience is the answer.  Resilience is what distinguishes those who fail from those who succeed, say Kathleen Sutcliffe and Timothy Vogus in Organizing for Resilience, a book chapter they wrote in 2003. Here they provide insights into why resilience is not something remarkable or extraordinary, but rather a result of an organizational learning process.

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