Defining resilience. (Preview).

We can't buy it or manufacture it or touch it. With discipline, we may be able to develop it. But as Diane L. Coutu, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, suggests, we recognize resilience only in retrospect, and we likely will never fully understand it. We observe resilience, the capacity to soldier on through adversity and setbacks, even to emerge stronger having faced down pressure, in people and organizations with staying power.

The excellent Harvard Business Review article "How Resilience Works" (May 2002) sheds more than a little light on the subject. Writer Coutu, who specializes in psychology and business, observes that the resilience theories she reviewed during her extensive research into the subject "overlap in three ways. Resilient people, [the theories posit], possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three." In the conclusion to her article, Coutu writes: "Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world, that is deeply etched into a person's mind and soul. Resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air. Others do not. This is the nature of resilience, and we will never completely understand it."

The father and son on our cover certainly reflect the nature of resilience, a subject that, in light of the past 15 months, seems apropos and that we chose to explore through a series of "Big Question" essays that begin on page 29. The son, Andrew Slaw, has a rare and fatal genetic disorder called familial dysautonomia, or FD. With only half the usual number of neurons in his autonomic nervous system, Andrew is prone to crises in which his heart rate and blood pressure reach life-threatening levels. The father, Ken Slaw, director of membership at the American Academy of Pediatrics, sees in Andrew a model of resilience. In fact, Ken, who wrote the essay on page 30, also embodies resilience. You see, he has thrown himself into work aimed at the vision of finding a cure for FD. He even started a foundation called FD Hope (www.fdvillage.org). And talk about testimony to resilience: A short time before we went to press with this issue, Ken reported that the consensus of researchers at an international conference t hat FD Hope helped produce with the National Institutes of Health is that "a meaningful treatment to stop the progressive, degenerative nature of FD is just 2 years away, and a cure may be only 10 years away."

We hope that in Ken and Andrew's story and the seven other essays that comprise "The Big Question" you find insight into the capacity to forge ahead. We thank Senior Editor Carl Levesque for directing the project and the eight authors--from members of the association community to Olympian Dan Steele to homeland security adviser Tom Ridge--for writing.

I'd be remiss were I not to mention the rest of the issue. We have an interview with management consultant and author Patrick Lencioni, who sheds light on curing the five dysfunctions of the work team (and who is speaking at ASAE's M&T: Winter Conference 2002 this month); an update on 457(b) deferred compensation plans; a case study on an American Library Association initiative that focuses on recruiting a diverse student pool as a first step toward having a workforce that reflects changing demographics; and, finally, ASAE's 2002 "Year in Review."

Before I close, one last thing: At staff headquarters, we're excited about ASAE's new and improved Web site (www.asaenet.org). If you haven't seen it already, you will soon. For more information, turn to "Headlines," and for a peak at what ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT has planned online, take a look at page 6. While without the human drama reflected in some of the resilience essays, the effort behind the ASAE Web site launch is nonetheless an example of what can be wrought through focus, discipline, and persistence.

Editor in Chief

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