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Recommended Resource – Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail
Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail: Governance and Management Lessons from the Crisis
by Thomas Stanton
About the Book
Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail by Thomas Stanton examines the fundamental shortcomings of both public and private financial sector companies as revealed during America’s ‘Great Recession.’ Thomas focuses on the areas of management, organization, and governance; contrasting the shortcomings of companies that failed with the sound practices of comparable organizations fairing well during the economic downturn.
Thomas concludes his book by relating the financial sector’s lessons learned to businesses within other industries that have faced similarly significant challenges. The result is the revelation of sound risk management practices that can help ensure companies in any industry are prepared to recognize and effectively deal with crisis situations.
Benefits of Using this Book
StrategyDriven Contributors like Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail for its insightful examination of why some companies respond well to crisis while others simply fail. Thomas provides insight not only to the direct management, organization, and governance issues hindering crisis recognition and response but the far more elusive combinations of attributes from these three areas that stymie if not paralyze an organization. By applying the best practices presented, organization leaders can better position their organization to recognize the onset of significant challenges – key to effectively dealing with any crisis – and react in a timely manner so to prevent a catastrophic outcome. We particularly appreciated Thomas’s extension of his book’s principles to other industries including:
- Petroleum industry
- Mining industry
- Natural gas distribution industry
- Hospital / Medical industry
- Government
This extension makes the book relevant to leaders of any organizational type.
StrategyDriven Contributors have written extensively on the topic of crisis management. We found Thomas’s principles to be highly consistent with and expounding to the crisis management best practices we endorse; making Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail a StrategyDriven recommended read.
Maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements, industry guidelines, and organizational commitments is the responsibility of every employee. Compliance typically occurs on a day-to-day basis through the performance of common policies, processes, and procedures. Subsequently, most organizations embed the actions necessary to achieve compliance within their instructional manuals. Ensuring these actions are both followed and remain in place over time is key to a successful compliance program.
Most think of risk management as an insurance policy, the price paid to help prevent potentially negative outcomes. Such a view leads to the conclusion that risk management is a business expense with a highly subjective value proposition. Risk management, however, offers companies a great deal of value and StrategyDriven would suggest the insurance view is far too narrow. Instead, effective risk management enables a business to accelerate its operations and market entry, to become more aggressive, an approach that in today’s fast paced marketplace environment is immeasurably valuable.
Maintaining compliance in today’s highly regulated, rule-driven marketplace requires diligent oversight of the organization’s core processes by the company’s staff. This oversight takes many forms from internal audits, self-assessments, management observations, and quality checkpoints embedded within the processes themselves. These points of oversight, however, may individually fall short from providing fully effective compliance risk assurance. Therefore, deliberate action should be taken to marry these assurance activities into a single cohesive program.
All enterprises face a unique set of risks that threatens long-term organizational success and viability. Like corporate level performance measures, it can be difficult to readily ‘see’ the day-to-day activities that initiate, amplify, or mitigate these risks. Mapping corporate risks to the line organization’s executable processes illuminates the risk related activities so they can be appropriately monitored and managed.
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