I’ve just had the pleasure of reading through Yossi Sheffi’s latest book entitled The Power of Resilience having pre-ordered it on Amazon.  Aside from the accessible writing style and many case studies which are included within the book, what struck me most was the recurring reference to Business Continuity and the key role it plays in the supply chain resilience story.  What’s more, this position is relatively new in supply chain circles.  When I looked back at Sheffi’s earlier book from 2005, Resilient Enterprise, there is not a single reference to Business Continuity.

Sheffi’s book is not a “how to” guide for building resilience but it does identify relevant tools for the kit bag with case studies from, generally, larger corporations.   The new idea in the book from my perspective was regarding detectability lead times and how to interpret signals to allow time to improve lead times.  Sheffi notes that many events have negative lead times, i.e. you find out about the problem after the risk event has materialised – specifically product defects, but data breaches could be added to this list too.  In my mind identifying and implementing strong risk indicators is a key capability in order to develop operational resilience.  The promise that Sheffi offers is that this capability will turn unknown unknowns into known unknowns and known unknowns into known knowns.

In re-reviewing Resilient Enterprise, the limitations of current thinking on resilience are, however, exposed.  The poster child of the resilience movement at the time was Nokia mobile phones and the case study lauded their huge business advantage over rival Ericsson that they gained due to their resilience around the Philips semiconductor fire in Mexico.  But where is Nokia mobile phones today?  Gone.  So their operational resilience did not translate into sustainable business resilience, i.e. Nokia mobile phones was not able to manage the market disruption of Apple and co.  Perhaps, it is a bridge too far to stretch resilience thinking into the strategic layer and it should instead be firmly positioned as an operational capability linked tightly to execution.  I’m not convinced.