Stefan Tengblad

Addressing Lock-in, Interoperability, and Long-Term Maintenance Challenges Through Open Source: How Can Companies Strategically Use Open Source?

This industry paper reports on how strategic use of open source in company contexts can provide effective support for addressing the fundamental challenges of lock-in, interoperability, and longevity of software and associated digital assets. The fundamental challenges and an overview of an ongoing collaborative research project are presented. Through a conceptual model for open source usage in company contexts we characterise how companies engage with open source and elaborate on how the fundamental challenges can be effectively addressed through open source usage in company contexts.

BP and Deepwater Horizon : A catastrophe from a resilience perspective

The chapter summarizes the BP-Deepwater Horizon accident 2010 in the Mexican Gulf, which caused 11 deaths and the largest oil spill in history. The chapter builds on secondary sources and a resilience analysis is made using the theoretical framework developed in the book. It is described what the main causes of the accident were and the events that took place before, under and after the accident. The resilience analysis clearly shows that maintaining time limits and budget was made at the expense of reliability and safety, and that unnecessary risks were taken in order to improve project economy. The end results were one of the most costly human made disasters in the history (over 50 billion USD).

Organization Resilience: What Makes Companies and Organizations Sustainable?

Organizational resilience deals with companies’ and organizations’ ability to survive, or more positively stated, to maintain their vitality in a changing world that constantly requires adaptation. This chapter introduces and describes the concept of organizational resilience and presents an overview of the book. A resilient company or organization is in the chapter defined as the capacity to use its technical, economic and social resources in order to develop long-term skills and competencies, in an efficient, reliable and flexible manner, and in a way it could manage challenges and exploit opportunities. This definition is developed both by acknowledging previous definitions and also by using the theoretical framework of the book consisting of evolutionary theory, complexity theory and practice theory of management.

Resilient Leadership: Lessons from Three Legendary Business Leaders

One way of gaining knowledge about organizational resilience is to studying business leaders who have contributed to create companies and business models with long endurance. In this chapter three successful Swedish business leaders are described and analyzed in accordance with the theoretical framework of the book. Some important results emerge from the analysis. First, an emphasis on creating decentralized organizations based on an active followership and trust is revealed. Second, the business leaders in question have shown the courage and capability to develop strategies even if they did not correspond to at the moment popular beliefs in society, and third the business leaders have shown the ability to find creative solution to situations they did not foresee, which included abandoning a previous strategy (i.e. flexible adaption).

Organizational Resilience: Theoretical Framework

In this chapter, a general theoretical framework of the book is presented. The framework builds on various sources of literature and in particular on an organic view on economic and organizational development. Using the classical concepts of variation, selection and retention, organizational resilience is seen as the capacity of a company to over time become a selected variation in the marketplace. Furthermore‚ the framework builds on findings from complexity theory that highlights the centrality of unforeseen events and unanticipated consequences. Such events and consequences can be both positive and negative (serendipities as well as severe challenges). The chapter ends in a new model that emphasizes the importance for a resilient organization to find an adequate balance between reliability, efficiency and change capacity.

The Champion Company that Disappeared: A Resilience Resources Analysis of Circuit City

Good to Great by Jim Collins and colleagues (2001) is one of the most influential management books in the last decades. In this chapter, a critical analysis of the book is made using the framework developed in the book. This is made through an analysis of the fate of Circuit City, one of the heralded companies in Good to Great. The critique contains displaying methodological flaws and the one-sidedness in Good to Great where simple and timeless business models fanatically applied is seen as a general recipe for success. On the contrary, the fate of Circuit City demonstrates the need of developing a strong financial base, efficient operations, good stakeholder relations as well as the ability to alter existing business models and to develop new models.

Conclusions: The Resilience Framework Summarized

A central claim in the chapter is that organizational resilience is not only a capability but also a philosophy of how organizations can manage surprises and face adverse, complex and uncertain environments in responsible and proactive ways, often even before crises occur. The chapter presents a holistic framework that analyses resilience from different perspectives: 1) as traits, 2) as processes, 3) as resources 4) as capabilities and 5) as prime sources. Furthermore, the main results from the book are summarized in seven main conclusions: 1) the changeable nature of the concept, 2) the multifaceted nature of the concept, 3) the importance of stakeholder interactions, 4) the relation between economies of scale, standardization and flexibility, 5) the importance of high reliability and 6) of local conditions and 7) that resilience is created by combining reliability, efficiency and change capacity.