Book Review: Tony Bendell,Building Anti-fragile Organisations—Risk,Opportunity and Governance in a Turbulent World

Predicting the business environment is becoming more and more difficult with every successive day in the present era of fast technological changes, innovation and shorter product life cycles. These realities have altered the traditional notion of business strategy making. One can foresee only a hazy picture of the critical success factors that would define tomorrow’s business. In this dispensation, quantifying the future too is becoming a complex affair. Decision-making, which invariably involves risk-taking, is becoming complex too. The average life span of high-ranking companies has reduced from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today; and by 2020, more than three-fourths of these companies would be such that they were never heard of before (Dr Richard Foster of Yale University). How are businesses going to survive in a world that increasingly defies understanding? We have certainly crossed the era of linear thinking, and need more and more of tangential understanding. In view of these emergent realities, there is a shift from rational strategy making to what Henry Mintzberg has described as emergent strategy. If most business strategies are to be seen as emerging, how should organizations guard themselves so as to plan their future? These realities have landed us in the era of incrementalism—continuously taking small steps to build the competence and solidity of the organization, which quite understandably are to be based on the foundation of changing business realities rather than any mere intuitive suppositions.

The author of this book, who claims to see a new paradigm shift in managing business, argues that more successful organizations are going to focus on ‘anti-fragility’ for their survival and growth, and will focus less and less on short-term efficiency and effectiveness. In a non-problematic sense, by the term ‘anti-fragility’ he means the ability of an organization to reflect greater degree of resilience and adaptability to environmental uncertainties. He has endorsed Taleb’s notion of anti-fragility which includes systems ‘that improve their resilience through being stressed’ (p. 5). This is as opposed to fragile systems that are not able to withstand ‘shocks’ and ‘adverse conditions’.

Through the eight chapters of this book, the author has argued that it is possible to build secure and unassailable organizational entities by pursuing policies that lead to what he calls a ‘high reliability organization (HRO)’. He has listed some features of anti-fragility organizations as follows: speedy learning in case of emergency; preoccupation of failure; reluctance to specify interpretations; sensitivity to operations; commitment to resilience; and deference to expertise (p. 3). The main chapters of the book that seek to articulate his perspective of an anti-fragile organization have been titled as follows: strategy; people and culture; processes and operations; information technology; supply chain and corporate social responsibility; and markets, products and services. Thus, he has tried to address anti-fragility issues related to the major focus areas of management. He has argued that this paradigm shift is the most significant thing that he has witnessed in his four decades of academic and consulting career. He claims that the concept of anti-fragility involves an integrated perspective of these issues. A focus on these issues through the lens of anti-fragility, he thinks, would help several organizations to save themselves from failure. This thinking would also enable identifying characteristics that could facilitate business survival for manufacturing and service organizations.

The book’s merits include the following: the author has put together contemporary management issues from different functional areas that emanate from the challenges that organizations and managers face today due to tumultuous competition. He has ably identified and discussed, for example, people management issues in this regard. The book coheres quite well, and the reader does not feel that the contents at any place are contradictory or patchy. The language is also lucid, with much less abstraction and jargon. In fact, this is an academic book written with the practitioner reader in mind, which is quite important from their point of view. The author has succeeded in juxtaposing business challenges as a whole and not just those that relate to individual functional areas. He also translates well at places the conceptual issues into their how-to-do applications. That would enable the reader, especially the businessman, to make use of the knowledge it contains.

If one asks whether the book really delivers something quite new, then that appears to be doubtful to me. Almost everything that is written in it is well known in other forms, and the building of solidity that Bendell talks about can be theoretically questioned as a discovery. Most of the information that he provides can be just an explanation of Barney’s rubric of the resource base, whereby organizations try to build the competence of their internal resources, which are capable of reflecting the following: value, rarity, imperfect imitability and non-substitutability. These resources help compete with their rivals and so is the core competence thesis of C.K. Prahlad. In the same vein, much of the contents of chapter three, for example, that explains the people dimensions and organizational culture is already well known in the form of empowerment model (or the Harvard model) of human resource management (HRM). He has talked strongly in favour of the need to shift from control and command to the empowerment model. From this point of view, the book is a kind of a well-written review of the existing literature on different facets of contemporary management thinking. And in view of these realities, it can certainly be said that it is ‘old wine in new bottle’.

However, considering some of the important parts of this literature review at one place, with the strategy perspective in mind, the book is likely to find favour with the students and the practitioner readers. In fact, it is an enjoyable reading from their perspective.