Resilience—the ability to recover from past setbacks and to face future challenges—is a sought-after quality of both people and businesses. MBA programs search for resilient people, develop resilience in their students and send them on to create resilient businesses.
Resilient Businesses
Boston Consulting Group cites three benefits to its Business Resilience Framework: “an external shock can have a lesser impact on their performance, the speed of their recovery can be faster, and the extent of their recovery can be greater.”
McKinsey & Co. points to resilience as critical to business success today: “The world is experiencing a level of disruption and business risk not seen in generations. Some companies freeze and fail, while others innovate, advance, and even thrive. The difference is resilience.”
Resilience can be tested by sudden disaster. A classic example is the case of Walmarts response following Hurricane Katrina. Walmart rapidly deployed essential supplies to affected communities, secured its supply chain and rebuilt stores in the region, thereby earning community loyalty as well as profits.
Not all disasters are as well-defined as a hurricane. The Covid pandemic is an example of a long, drawn-out catastrophe in which businesses changed or died. Climate change is another example of a worldwide disruption in slow motion.
In the 21st century, change is constant and accelerating. The times call for businesses and people who can remain flexible, respond quickly and retain an attitude of hard-working optimism.
Resilient People
Future leaders, too, face shocks, setbacks and long-term challenges, and must develop the personal skills needed to recover. Rebecca Zucker, executive coach and co-founder of Next Step Partners, says that resilience “is a muscle that we develop rather than a quality that we are born with. Improving our ability to handle adversity allows us to empathize with others, lead better, as well as propel our career to new levels and live a happier life.”
MBA admissions committees look for evidence of resilience in applicants. How you show them that you have this prized trait?
In some cases, an essay prompt asks applicants to tell the committee about a time when they suffered a serious setback. A question about failure may come up during an interview. The purpose of this inquiry is not to get you to dwell on what went wrong, but to give you a chance to reveal what you learned from the experience that will help you—and your team or community—going forward.
Some people have indeed lived through tragedy or trauma and triumphed over adversity. However, it is not necessary to have experienced dramatic personal hardship. It is especially important not to write about such an experience just for shock value. The important thing is not the difficulty itself, but how you responded to it.
Michael Robinson, Senior Director of MBA Admissions at Columbia Business School, explains it this way in correspondence: “I believe in a distance traveled approach, where you consider the resources or opportunities that the applicant had, given the outcomes or accomplishments. So, we look for real examples of resilience and perseverance, evidence that the person has overcome challenges. That said, the applicant still should remain centered around leadership and professional accomplishment. I don’t want anyone to misinterpret this as a trauma sharing contest. It’s not. This is about context that helps us understand how you will contribute to our community.”
Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn describes the importance of resilience this way: ““This is such an extraordinarily important capability because we live in a world that’s one nonstop crisis—one calamity, one emergency, one unexpected, often difficult surprise—after another, like waves breaking on the shore.”
Today, more than ever, both businesses and people need resilience.
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