Building resilience capabilities at “Big Brown Box, Inc.” Liisa Välikangas and A. Georges L. Romme

Citation

Gorrell, C. (2012), "Building resilience capabilities at “Big Brown Box, Inc.” Liisa Välikangas and A. Georges L. Romme", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 40 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2012.26140daa.008

Building resilience capabilities at “Big Brown Box, Inc.” Liisa Välikangas and A. Georges L. Romme

Article Type: Quick takes From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 40, Issue 4

Widely known for its emphasis on organic growth and customer focus, much of the “Big Brown Box” (a giant company in the US consumer electronics retail market) success can be credited to its resilience training – from the sales counter to the executive conference rooms.

Training for resilience involves mastering three strategic management practices:

1. 1.

   Cultivating foresight. This is the capacity to see multiple futures and imagine and test possible responses. Complacency is a seductive companion to success, so ‘resilience training’ allows the boundaries of routine understanding to be continuously tested.

2. 2.

   Rehearsing non-routine behaviors. In most retail organizations, few employees willingly explore novel sales opportunities. Exploitation feels easy and confident; exploration difficult and intimidating. So exploration of the new ways remains unrehearsed.

3. 3.

   Building an experimentation-oriented community. A community of professionals is needed to sustain continuous experimentation and provide a platform for serendipitous learning and encounters. Together the group continually wrestles with a small set of key questions. What new business idea can we experiment with? How can we make the learning of a grassroots effort visible throughout the organization? How can top leadership constantly resist knowing “what’s right and shutting everyone else up?”

Resilience builds both a strong defense and offenseThe practice of resilience training gains importance as a company’s competitive environment becomes increasingly uncertain and volatile. Resilience has two dimensions (see Exhibit 1):

• •

  Operational resilience is the ability to bounce back after a crisis – or, more broadly, to respond to adversity.

• •

  Strategic resilience is the ability to turn threats into opportunities before it is too late – that is, to effectively respond to opportunity. Preparing for a response to adversity implies enhancing the organizational defenses, while the response to an opportunity involves engaging in exploration and experimentation that serve to build a portfolio of options for the future.

The takeaway from the “BBB, Inc.” exampleAll companies need to continually exercise their operational resilience to prepare for setbacks and the maneuvers of rivals. This rehearsing and training will help an organization learn how to proactively engage in exploration and experimentation.