Create a positive trajectory of entrepreneurial functioning

Did you know that resilience was somebody’s job?

I stumbled upon a fascinating study in the international journal of management about the construct of organizational resilience.

In the last few decades, this phenomenon has gained new momentum in academic literature, mainstream media and business publications. Numerous researchers revealed that companies, institutions and other entitles can survive and thrive amidst adversity or turbulence.

As long as there are dedicated team members to help them deliver products and services at acceptable levels following any disruptive incident, the organization can remain resilient.

Check out the most common job titles:

Resilience officer, continuity planner, resilience analyst, crisis manager, recovery specialist, disaster responder and risk consultant, to name a few.

Turns out, the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company is a huge part of corporate health.

Now, most of the organizations who staff such roles are quite large. These are billion or trillion dollar entities with tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of employees.

But just because a team only employees a few hundred people, doesn’t mean they can’t increase their resilience. The same principles can be followed to deal with adversity.

For example, knowledge. Among all of the assets an organization owns, few are more scalable than information. Resilience comes from the ability to transfer knowledge to deal with the situation at hand.

Organizations that have deep absorptive capacity, which is the ability to appreciate, transform and exploit new knowledge for strategic purposes, will win.

I remember during the first year of the pandemic, I was working at a franchise marketing technology startup. Since we had a twenty year history in the space, we saw the public health crisis as an opportunity to leverage our intellectual assets for the betterment of the industry.

Our president held a meeting with the team and had a very frank conversation. She posed the questions:

Why is the pandemic going to be a huge advantage for us? What proprietary data do we own about franchising that nobody else does?

This is pure resiliency thinking. Anytime an organization enhances their ability to quickly process feedback and flexibly rearrange information into tangible forms, they grow their equity.

Our team knew that the data we collected on millions of potential franchise owners and their career aspirations was a powerful weapon, but one we hadn’t exploited to its full potential. During the first few months of lockdown, our engineers used our database to create a trend report showing an uptick in interest in home based franchise businesses, considering how many people had just lost their jobs in the pandemic.

We used that data in our sales presentations, marketing materials and public relations campaigns. And it paid off. This new configuration of old data better fit our new environmental conditions and made our tech products and services more attractive to prospects and customers.

That’s the power of knowledge as a resilience builder. With the right information, any company can create a positive trajectory of entrepreneurial functioning after a crisis, disturbance, or challenge.

It’s simply a matter of leverage.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What proprietary data do we own about franchising that nobody else does?