Insights and Implications

Introduction

This chapter presents a novel view on enterprise, research and opportunity on the premise of enterprise philosophy, continuum of change, immunity and resiliency. The views of understanding enterprise from immunological perspective, researching enterprise to ensuring plasticity of immunity, and seeking opportunity by building enterprise resiliency are uniquely appeared in the chapter. This text attempts to link the insights into the change management interventions as well as the matters of future research and opportunity to the enterprise philosophy, immunity and resiliency in the continuum of change. The interventions like people-based, techno-structural, strategic change and action research at one part and the theories like institutional, ecological, conflict, life-cycle and rational adaptive at the other have been discussed in the chapter. The issues of competition avoidance, situational adaptation, actor conformance, employee partnership, performance balance, preventive measure, enterprising tolerance, consensus building and reciprocal interdependence are specified for future research and opportunity in the continuum of change.

The uncompromising intellectual quest for understanding enterprise life cannot satisfy itself if it is thwarted at every corner by the observed discontinuities—the change. The experience, business models and research findings are still creating confusion about the life-giving liquid of an enterprise i.e. what make an enterprise survival and successful in the continuum of discontinuities. Enterprise has no choice better than develop/build resiliency for its survival and success along the unlimited strength of time and situations.

Past performance records and leadership alone cannot necessarily be moving an enterprise to its success in future. A resilient enterprise is not a prisoner of past performance, it does not rely on the right leader alone for success but it builds the capability to be resilient into the organization (Valikangas, 2010). Past performance of an enterprise are more close to the critical success factors of its past products and the success factors working best during the past need not necessarily work best in the future. The success of a leader is contingent as well.

An enterprise is moving with life after life in the continuum of change. The concept of product life-cycle indicates that a product has its own life; therefore, an enterprise has life-cycle as well. Single product enterprise moves with single life and multi-products enterprise moves with multiple lives. Enterprising is also a continuum of the life after the life, which is continuous along with lives in the form of an entity. We see the entity in the form of enterprise. We tend to link enterprise life with its product’s life; in fact, it is not linked as such. Product disappears but enterprise remains in grief. Resiliency is essential to bring the enterprise to its original position from the grief and to move along the continuum of change. The change interventions, theories, insights, issues and implications (seeFigure 1) are the matters of future research and opportunities.

Figure 1.

Insights and Implications

The Interventions And Theories

The odyssey of enterprising is continuous by marking and making changes from the very beginning of human civilization. It is obvious that hundreds and thousands of enterprises have been established, operationalized and disappeared during the past. Some of them disappeared just after their establishment and some became operational for some more time and eventually disappeared from the market. The enterprise being operational today have variation in their history—some have hundreds of years, some have decades, some have years, and come have even days.

The questions like why do enterprises establish, grow, mature, decline and disappear; how does today’s useful idea of doing business becomes useless one tomorrow; and what make the difference between today’s standard and tomorrow’s actual indicators are very hard to answers. The difficulties in answering such questions are inviting other questions like when is it essential to change the course of today’s business and what happens when one does not make change in the course of its business.