… From the Editor

Abstract

While leafing through a gift catalog recently, I came across a pair of desk accessories inscribed, “The road to success is always under construction” and “The only constant is change.” Those words neatly reflect the themes expressed in the pages that follow. As Erica Seville, Debbie Van Opstal, and John Vargo explain in their primer on resilience on page 6, managing volatility has become standard operating procedure. They outline seven principles that business leaders can apply to nurture the agility needed to weather unexpected disruptions, and show how they have been used to help a variety of organizations thrive, even in tough times. At FalconStor Software, an international data protection company, big change came in the form of expansion into the public sector. On page 19, Valeh Nazemoff details how a partnership with Acolyst, a government technology consulting firm, led FalconStor to fully exploit its financial, customer, data, and mastermind intelligence to transform its operations and take advantage of the opportunities awaiting in an untapped market. For GDF SUEZ, a French multinational, the creation of communities of practice (CoPs) enabled its leaders to perfect the organizational juggling act of exploring new knowledge while refining existing competencies. As Pierre-Jean Barlatier and Olivier DuPouët explain on page 43, to get the most of such contextual ambidexterity, business leaders must set up a clearly defined system for disseminating the valuable knowledge they capture. Even when state-of-the-art technology is the catalyst for change, the role of the leader is pivotal. On page 29, Kallol Kumar Basu reviews various aspects of leadership and change management and analyzes five case studies in technology transformation to identify the common traits that can best equip managers to successfully spearhead such initiatives. Any kind of change within an enterprise entails an element of risk, and on page 54, a team of researchers—Bahareh Hossein Nezhad Nedaei, Siti Zaleha Abdul Rasid, Saudah Sofian, Rohaida Basiruddin, and Abolfazl Amanollah Nejad Kalkhouran—present a new model for managing it. Their contingency-based framework calls for considering the relationships among the organization's level of decentralization, size, and enterprise resource planning strategies in order to overcome the obstacles to improving overall performance. Rounding out this issue, another team of researchers—Ajay Kumar Behera, Narayan Chandra Nayak, Harish Chandra Das, and Rabindra Narayan Mohapatra—assess the impact of information technology (IT) in 125 firms in the Indian banking and software sectors. Focusing on efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity, their empirical study on page 67 found a significant positive relationship between IT adoption and enhanced organizational performance and a positive relationship between IT application and increased effectiveness and efficiency of service. In other words, change can be good.