Mastering Change with Passion and Agility: The Capacity for Business Resilience

Improvements to technology and shifts in printing trends signal a promising future for digital print solutions. New opportunities for innovation are emerging from the analogue to digital transitions that are happening in this era of development in business and society.

Conventional business wisdom has always emphasized the importance of adaptability, grit, and other related values in a fundamentally uncertain environment. The global COVID-19 pandemic has further reinforced the urgency of developing resilience. This was certainly the case for FUJIFULM Business Innovation Asia Pacific, where the crisis challenged our ability to maintain business continuity, manage risk, and innovatively lead when ‘normal’ business operations were disrupted.

We recently sat down with FUJIFILM Business Innovation Asia Pacific President, Masatsugu Naito, to hear about his experiences of facing firsthand the leadership challenges of the pandemic. In the first installment of this two-part series, we discussed his thoughts on resilience, his triedand-tested framework for navigating disruption, guidelines for setting business priorities, and his philosophy for embracing change.

How would you define a resilient business?

Masatsugu Naito: Resilience has become a buzzword. Everyone is talking about resilient societies, resilient organizations, and resilient infrastructure. That just reflects how our environment has been completely changed because of the pandemic. Now we’re in what’s called a new normal. I see resilience as a capacity, something that businesses should be able to do. How can we adapt quickly under such a new normal? Are we able to recover and generate new opportunities from change?

From your perspective, business resilience is more about how to come back or recover from a setback

Masatsugu Naito: That's correct. Especially in the current situation, "coming back" means knowing how to recover and adapt. Prior to the pandemic, the world was completely different. We’ve seen how everything’s crumbled since then. Adapting to the new normal is a challenging skill to learn.

Given that your definition of resilience is more about comeback