Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
Lubin School of Business Reflecting on Resilience: Thoughts on the Summit on Resilience Conference from the Perspective of a Management Professor Ira J. Morrow, PhD Department of Management, The Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York, NY Introduction On January 11, 2012, Pace University in New York City hosted a conference titled Summit on Resilience: Securing our future through public-private partnerships. The conference was organized by Pace University in collaboration with the US Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security and was sponsored by Boeing and Target. Rather than summarizing or reviewing the content of the conference program, this paper endeavors to discuss some of the issues or themes to emerge either directly or indirectly from the conference from the perspective of a business school faculty member, specifically in the case of the present author, from the perspective of a management faculty member who specializes in organizational behavior and leadership. Issue 1: Defining Resilience Resilience certainly sounds like a great quality to have, but what is it precisely? The participants in the Summit on Resilience had many interesting matters to report and discuss, but none of the speakers or panelists provided a definition of this key term. The implicit assumption seems to have been that all participants and attendees must know and agree on what resilience means. However, judging from the wide range of topics and issues presented at the conference, resilience, it seems, can mean different things to different people, and the term or concept can apparently be applied to many different entities or phenomena. In order to provide the basis for a more orderly and structured consideration of the state of resilience in our society and in our institutions, it might be useful to try to more carefully define what we are referring to when we use the term. So for example, the old, very heavy, but very resilient, Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines resilience as: 1. The power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity. 2. Ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyant. (Stein, 1973). The latest online New Oxford American Dictionary similarly defines resilience as 1. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. 2. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. Thus, one point that clearly comes across from these definitions is that the term can clearly be applied to both inanimate objects, which seems to be its original or preferred meaning, and secondarily to human beings. This is reminiscent of how the term stress was expanded from its original use as an engineering term referring to the outside forces applied to materials that could lead to breakage or failure, to its subsequent application to people. In fact, it is in the context of the topic of stress management that the issue of resilience frequently appears. Hence, taking steps to build up one's individual resilience by for example, eating properly, exercising regularly, and sleeping adequately, is seen as one of the key strategies that one 31