Excerpt: The Case for Business Resiliency: Vulnerability and Disruption (Chapter 10, Pages 131-132)

Consider the following events:

• A terrorist attack

• A Category 4 hurricane

• The outbreak of a disease that affects livestock or crops

• A cooling system failure in a server room

• Oprah endorses a product on her show

What do they have in common? They can all affect a company's normal business patterns, causing a disruption in business. Although most people think that a disruption means something that interrupts business operations, this is not necessarily so. A disruption can also be a surge in business to meet new, unexpected demand or a new pricing strategy by a competitor that kills demand for your product. Both surges and drops in demand can bring about a fundamental change to business -- changes that interrupt or alter business as usual.

Business disruptions can do immeasurable harm to a company. They can keep companies from delivering on promised goods and services to their customers, and they can create a domino effect throughout a supply chain. The impact of these disruptions can be drastic, and not just in terms of business loss or serious reductions in revenue. There is also the fact that they reveal, sometimes internally and sometimes publicly, the vulnerability of business and how much of our supply chains can be out of our control.

The good news is that business vulnerability and disruption need not destroy your company or hack holes into your supply chain that take years to fix. Businesses can mitigate vulnerability or even use the adversity that comes with it to soar past their competitors. The secret to doing either of these is business resiliency -- the ability to bounce back after a business disruption.

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