Finally, resilience is likely to get a boost from more effective corporate governance that not only provides better safeguards against wrongdoing, but also improves leadership. Directors, feeling the heat from shareholder activists, litigators, and regulators, will have to make sure that management has a plan for the future that doesn’t just relive the past, and provides the right resources to promote resilience.
In the long run, the answer to economic adaptation is not to let companies die. We need to apply our ingenuity to drive management innovations from within corporations and seek to define policy reforms that make companies more capable and thus less disposable, so that all corporations, old and new, live longer and more productive lives.
Liisa Välikangas (lvalikangas@woodsideinstitute.org) is the managing director of the Woodside Institute, a research organization in Woodside, Calif., that develops new management practices to improve corporate resilience.
