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24 (119) 2016
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British Investment

BSI – past and future

by Joanna Bańkowska, managing director, BSI Group Polska
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One of the ways in which human civilisation has advanced over the past few decades has been the introduction of standards into many business processes, starting with manufacturing industry, leading to far greater reliability built into the things we use.

The result – greater user satisfaction, increased safety, and far less frustration.

After WW2, the British Standards Institution (BSI) and other national standards bodies founded International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and ever since then,  the concept of quality-management  systems has become standardised and has spread across business and the public sector.

Ever since 1901, BSI has been helping organisations improve, capturing best practice and shaping the standards of excellence in product specification, business processes and in business potential. Today, we have over 30,000 standards within our portfolio. Many of these are recognised as shaping some of the most used and implemented standards worldwide, such as the Quality and Environment Management series (ISO 9001 and ISO 14001) adopted by over a million organisations around the world.

BSI has been present  in Poland since 1981. The main goal has always been to help organisations embed habits of excellence by defining what ‘good’ looks like and developing best-practice solutions that improve their performance, manage their risks and help them grow sustainably.

What’s our direction nowadays?

One only has to consider how many major companies that have met their demise over the years to see that long-term prosperity in business is rare. Longevity in business is about more than strong quarter-on-quarter sales growth. There are many theories  about how companies can make themselves resilient. In ensuring the longer-term survival of a company, the real test of success is not short-term results, but the ability to deliver good results consistently over an extended period. Conversely, thinking only about the long-term can cause short-term disruption. Organisations must balance their short-term goals with longer-term thinking.

In certain industries, a longer-term view is more prevalent – with greater emphasis on resilience. This is particularly true of higher-risk sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace. Here, governments tend to impose regulation, rather than rely on organisations to invest in business improvement. Such businesses work within more closely defined parameters, but they still operate in highly competitive markets and must strive to get the balance right between short-term performance and investment with longer-term horizons.

The most resilient organizations are eager to learn from their own and others’ experiences to mitigate risk. Learning from collective experience through peer-to-peer networking and knowledge sharing is vital, not least when businesses seek to penetrate new and unfamiliar markets.

BSI works to embed excellence through the shaping and implementation of standards, helping organisations around the world meet the challenges of today and anticipate the needs of tomorrow. We see a future where standards will not only shape products and business processes but also create the potential for organisations to gain the most from the values and principles that govern their reputation.

That’s how the model of Organisational Resilience was created by BSI. It’s an extension of our mission to help organisations embed habits of excellence throughout their business, enabling them to pass the test of time.

BSI’s model for Organizational Resilience is built upon a century of experience and tens of thousands of client interactions around the world. It distils the requirements for Organizational Resilience into three essential elements: product excellence, process reliability and people behaviour. These three elements combine to provide the customer with the best possible overall experience. A business that achieves this consistently over time will not only build customer loyalty, but also trust and long-term relationships with all its stakeholders.


”A resilient organization is one that not merely survives over the long term, but flourishes – passing the test of time”

Howard Kerr, chief executive, BSI

Resilience is a familiar subject to the business world. There’s a wealth of academic research and numerous management papers on harnessing resilience in the face of growing business threats. However, ‘organisational resilience’ is a relatively new term to indicate a much broader principle of resilience as a value driver for an organisation. Much less has been written about this.

Organisational resilience involves more than simply the ability to survive, vital though this is. It enables businesses to harness experience and embrace opportunity in order to prosper in today’s dynamic, interconnected world. As a result, BSI views organisational resilience as a strategic imperative for any business.

Ultimately, organisational resilience is the manifestation of ‘making excellence a habit’. A business leader’s professional obligation must be to ensure that their organisation performs consistently well and to leave it in robust shape for the future. To achieve that, they must ensure their organisation, as well as its business, is resilient.

“Habitual excellence is at the heart of resilience, but this heart needs to power muscular business characteristics”

On this approach BSI will concentrate in the future.

Read more at: http://news.cbi.org.uk/businessvoice/latest/organisational-resilience-how-to-build-an-enduring-enterprise/ and http://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/our-services/Organizational-Resilience/

Read more about Organizational Resilience in Polish: http://www.bsigroup.com/pl-PL/Nasze-uslugi/Organizational-Resilience-pl/

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