Charles is an executive who works for a well-respected company, which, for the purpose of this article we will call Morningstar. By the time he visited me, Morningstar had experienced almost two years of decline. Although the company had products the market seemed to accept, had an experienced management and 30 years in the market, it had been unable to recover after progressively losing share of the market to its competitors for the last two years. Literally, Morningstar was dying and the main symptom was its inability to change, to effectively respond to the situation. This article represents the situation that many companies experience when they face fierce market competition.

Mark Vickers, from the Institute of Corporate Productivity, compares business competition to a contact sport competition. Anyone who participates in a contact sport competition will at one point get some bumps and bruises or more serious damage. In the same way, companies that compete in the market soon learn that competitors come up with unexpected new products, offer similar products at lower prices, present better financing options, implement marketing campaign that damage or diminish their competitors' image and use any other strategy to overcome the competition to gain a larger portion of the market. Certainly, when companies face competitors in the market, they are exposed to experience the damage of that competition. That was exactly what Morningstar was experiencing.

However, the most important thing for a company is its "ability to minimize the damage, recover fast and quickly get back in the game with new strategies, business models and products. That is what business `resilience' is all about" Vickers says. Neilson, Pasternack and Van Nuys state in an article published in Harvard Bussiness Review that resilient companies are "highly adaptable to external market shifts, yet focused on and aligned behind a coherent business strategy." This definition implies that resilient companies possess organizational flexibility without losing sight of their strategic goals.

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