Who Needs To Rebrand When You Can "Bounce" To Future Success?

By Doug Hall, Director of Business Development, AIM, Inc.

How often do we think of implementing a radical structural fix when an attitude and leadership adjustment could be the remedy? Such a radical reaction may be to rebrand and/or relaunch when, in fact, our problems can be overcome with a systematic approach to improved team performance. Our personal or organizational response to crisis or a challenging situation may be equated to an object dropping to a hard surface. The results are radically different if the object is a glass ornament, an orange or a resilient rubber ball. In each case the object has a sudden loss of altitude, encounters a hard surface, and then reacts according to its nature. Shattering, thudding, or rebounding are the results and this analogy can apply to our personal or organization reactions to a crisis. I’m pretty sure we would all prefer a rebound that is higher than the original point of the drop. This possibility comes alive in successful business executive and author Keith McFarland’s book, Bounce, about a fictional division VP and his management team dealing with business stagnation and threat of being sold-off or shutdown. McFarland’s systematic approach to understanding and managing an organizational rebound is the “bounce” in the book title.

McFarland’s model for “bouncing” is adapted from the classic book Resilience: Discovering a New Strength at Times of Stress, by Frederic Flach, a psychiatrist and author. Flach was a pioneer in thinking about what makes people resilient and he reasons that people, like organizations, have strong homeostatic impulses; a drive to “keep things the same.” When they encounter severe or discontinuous change, they inevitably go through a period of disintegration followed by reintegration. Flach finds that resisting this process, due to either denial or nostalgia, may leave people or organizations vulnerable to future stress and may lead to anxiety, depression, or stagnation.

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