Judith
Rodin’s Required Reading
In
August 2005, a few months after Judith
Rodin was named the first female president of
the Rockefeller Foundation, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast.
In the days, months, and years that followed, the critical importance of
resilience — the ability to prepare for systemic disruptions, survive them,
and transform them into opportunities for growth — became evident.
Since
then, Rodin, an academic by training and a nonprofit leader by profession, has
adopted the concept of resilience
as a core focus of the Rockefeller Foundation. She is
deploying the philanthropic organization’s US$4.2 billion in assets to promote
and develop the resilience of cities, organizations, and communities. A prolific writer with
15 books to her credit, Rodin also wrote a book on the topic to help spread the
word,The Resilience
Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong (PublicAffairs, 2014).
Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation,
Rodin was president of the University of Pennsylvania. The first woman to head
an Ivy League school, she led the university for a decade — a period in which
research funding doubled and the endowment tripled. Before that, Rodin served
as provost and a named professor at Yale, where she conducted pioneering
research in behavioral medicine and health psychology.
Since disruption is an issue that applies to
business as much as society at large, I asked Rodin to share the books that
have most influenced her thinking on the subject, ones that she thinks business
leaders should read to understand and nurture the resilience of their
organizations. She responded with the following three titles.
The Resilient
Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, by Yossi Sheffi (MIT Press, 2005).
“Professor Sheffi highlights the fact that the businesses that do
best after an unforeseeable disaster are the ones that make the right decisions
before a crisis ever strikes. He explores how companies can build, and bolster,
their resilience by making their supply chains more flexible, baking critical
redundancies into their organizational design and collaborating more closely
with partners who can help reinforce their safety, come what may. The book
includes instructive stories from organizations as diverse as Southwest
Airlines, Zara, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Navy.”
Five
Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink (Crown, 2013).
“I’m
a huge fan of Fink’s stark and comprehensive story of how things came apart at
one hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Rockefeller Foundation
was invited into New Orleans after the storm to help the city rebuild in a
unified way, and while I saw the aftermath firsthand, this prize-winning
journalistic account of the real-time decision making needed under such dire
circumstances within a single institution is both harrowing and humbling. The
book is incredibly well-researched, revealing the tangle of issues — race,
class, geography, and an inescapable history — that contributed to the horror
in New Orleans. Fink artfully illustrates just how ill-prepared New Orleans’s
Memorial Medical Center — and, by extension, the city’s entire civic machinery
— was for a crisis of this magnitude. The most important lesson for leaders in
a world where crisis is the new normal: Despite the crisis plans Memorial had
in place, management’s lack of situational awareness crippled its response.”
A
Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2009).
“This
book provides a vivid and inspiring portrait of several communities brought
together by the crucible of disaster: San Francisco after the earthquake and
fires of 1906; the 1917 maritime disaster in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Mexico City
after its 1985 earthquake; and the more recent crises of 9/11 and Katrina.
Solnit’s wonderful, paradigm-shifting observation is that, somehow, crisis
brought out the best in these communities, individually and collectively. She
describes the emotion brought on by tragedy as ‘graver than happiness but
deeply positive,’ lending confirmation to the oft-referenced idea that a crisis
is a terrible thing to waste. This wide-ranging investigation of human nature
and how we manage to rise to the most unthinkable occasions offers incredible
insight into the ways in which people and communities — and, one imagines,
corporations, too — can build back stronger than ever.”
Theodore
Kinni
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