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RESILIENT BY DESIGN Creating Businesses That Adapt and Flourish in a Changing World

By Joseph Fiksel Washington, DC (October 22, 2015) —The new normal of climate change and a volatile, hyper-connected global economy mean that sudden natural disasters and unforeseen supply chain disruptions are here to stay—and pursuing business as usual is no longer a viable option. But how can businesses adjust? Joseph Fiksel argues that the key is resilience—an organization’s capacity to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of change.

In his new book, Resilient by Design: Creating Businesses That Adapt and Flourish in a Changing World (Publication Date: October 22, 2015), Fiksel outlines a new paradigm that helps managers design for resilience. Resilient enterprises continue to grow and evolve in order to meet the needs and expectations of their shareholders and stakeholders. They adapt to turbulence successfully by anticipating disruptive changes, recognizing new business opportunities, building strong relationships, and designing resilient assets, products, and processes.

By taking an integrated view of the built environment, ecosystems, and social fabric in which businesses operate, Fiksel shows that companies can transform themselves from being unaware of how vulnerable their business is, to being capable of overcoming the next crisis and “bouncing forward.”

Resilient by Design provides business executives with a comprehensive approach to achieving lasting success in a changing world. Rich with examples and case studies of organizations that are designing resilience into their business processes, it explains how to ISLAND PRESS | PRESS RELEASE | 1

connect with important external systems—stakeholders, communities, infrastructure, supply chains, and natural resources—and create innovative, dynamic organizations that survive and prosper under any circumstances.

Written by one of the leading experts in enterprise resilience and sustainability, Resilient by Design offers a confident path forward in a world that is increasingly less certain.

Dr. Joseph Fiksel serves as Executive Director of the Sustainable and Resilient Economy program at The Ohio State University, and was formerly Vice President for Life Cycle Management at Battelle. He coordinates Ohio State’s collaboration with leading global companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations to develop new methods and tools for improving the sustainability and resilience of enterprises and supply chains.

Resilient by Design

By Joseph Fiksel Hardcover and E-book Publication Date: October 22, 2015 256 pages | Price: $32.00 ISBN: 978-1-61091-587-8 www.islandpress.org/resilient-by-design Founded in 1984, Island Press works to stimulate, shape, and communicate the information that is essential for solving environmental problems. Today, with more than 800 titles in print and some 40 new releases each year, it is the nation’s leading publisher of books on environmental issues. But Island Press does more than publish books. It advances environmental science by nurturing the exchange of ideas across disciplines and sectors, and by helping to create a multidisciplinary literature on environmental problems and solutions. The knowledge created is spread far beyond the range of a limited marketplace through sophisticated communications initiatives that reach journalists, academics, policymakers, practitioners and the general public. Through these efforts, Island Press is driving change by moving ideas from the printed page to public discourse and practice.

Island Press’s emphasis is, and will continue to be, on transforming objective information into understanding and action. For more information and further updates be sure to visit www.islandpress.org. ###

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT EMAIL CONTACT EMAIL

Jaime Jennings, 202-232-7933 x44 jjennings@islandpress.org Katharine Sucher, 202-232-7933 x43 ksucher@islandpress.org

THE WHYS AND HOWS OF RESILIENCE

BY JOSEPH FIKSEL 

Resilience is essential in a tightly connected, volatile global economy. Global supply chains may be more cost-effective, but they also make businesses more vulnerable to a broader range of disruptions, from economic swings to natural disasters. Resilience enables companies to enjoy the advantages of global trade while being better prepared for unforeseen “black swan” events.

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Traditional risk management is inadequate for coping with complex systems. Risk management is designed for known risks, and is ill-equipped for a world in which a minor disruption in one region can trigger serious consequences in other industry sectors on faraway continents. Resilience can help a company reduce vulnerabilities while maximizing opportunities, even when the future is unpredictable.

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Companies can learn from the resilience characteristics found in nature. All living things are resilient: those that can’t cope with the latest challenge will not survive. From microbes to entire ecosystems, nature offers examples of how businesses can make their assets, products, and organizations more resilient.

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Enterprise resilience depends upon both natural capital and social capital. The environment is the ultimate source of all a company’s raw materials and energy, and society provides labor, skills, and markets. Managers cannot assume that these resources will be continuously available, and must pay attention to the resilience of these critical external systems.

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Business processes and assets can be intentionally designed for resilience. There are concrete, actionable ways to make any business more resilient. Resilient by Design offers a toolkit for strategic and operational resilience improvement that can be applied to organizations of any size or industry sector.

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Resilience is the first step toward ensuring long-term enterprise sustainability. A sustainable society must be based on a dynamic worldview that enables both companies and communities to constantly adapt to emerging challenges—this is the very essence of resilience.

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