Strategic resistance for sustaining enterprise relevance : A paradigm for sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness

Purpose – Enterprise sustainability is the capacity to create and maintain social, economic, and environmental benefits. While sustainability connotes survival, excellence is the capacity to thrive across critical performance domains. Enter resilience and robustness. Resilience is enterprise ability to self-renew through innovation, changing and reinventing itself by adapting its responses to political, social, economic and other competitive shocks or challenges. Robustness is enterprise resistance or immunity gained through strategies, policies, partnerships, and practices that maintain or advance competitive position when shocks or challenges arise. Resistance as herein constructed is a composition or blend of revival, striving, surviving and thriving. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness (SEER2) model and assessment regime is proposed. SEER2 integrates excellence and sustainability principles, methodologies, and standards to optimize enterprise performance across the triple bottom line people, planet, and profit domains. Findings – A Springboard to SEER2 model blending simplicity, applicability, and usability by a range of enterprises is introduced. Its enablers include data analytics and intelligence, human ecology, and social-ecological innovation. Springboard technology includes an assessment regime that yields actionable feedback and foresight. These inform next generation strategy, activities and performance that support identification and implementation of best and next best practices and sources of competitive advantage. Practical implications – The Springboard to SEER2 enterprise self-assessment approach restricts itself to sustainability, excellence, resilience and robustness considerations. Originality/value – A model integrating SEER2 in relation to strategic resistance is introduced.