Management Strategy

Resilience isn’t a rebrand. It’s what sustainability always was

Ecosystems don’t return to their prior state after major disruption. They transform. Read More

By Joel Makower April 28, 2026

Optimizing for efficiency and shareholder returns can also bring fragility — as we're seeing today in the Strait of Hormuz. Source: Martin 73 via Shutterstock

Key Takeaways:

Resilience requires slack, redundancy and optionality — the exact things quarterly earnings pressure has stripped out of business.
Companies that survive the coming volatility are those already doing the work sustainability professionals have championed for decades.
The same solution can smell of morality or smell of money. For most C-suites, that framing determines everything.

The word “resilience” is everywhere right now. Which probably means it’s already in trouble.

In our latest Two Steps Forward episode, Solitaire Townsend and I pulled on this thread — and found something worth sharing: Resilience isn’t a rebrand for sustainability. It’s what sustainability always was, just dressed in language that the C-suite might finally recognize.

Here’s the structural problem: Resilience requires slack. It requires redundancy. It requires optionality. All those things look, at least on a quarterly P&L, like waste and inefficiency — which is likely seen as anathema to investors.

Consider: For years, supply chains have been optimized to the bone in pursuit of efficiency. But that optimized efficiency can produce brittleness — for example, when Japan’s 2011 tsunami disrupted semiconductor and auto supply chains globally, or when Middle East instability closes the Strait of Hormuz and there’s no backup for things like ammonia for fertilizer or petrochemicals for plastics.

The redundancy was engineered out.

The new normal isn’t normal

What’s changing is that those previously unprecedented events are becoming routine. Climate disruption, geopolitical fracture, supply shocks — these aren’t cyclical anymore; they’re structural. The old playbook of weathering a downturn and returning to “normal” assumes there’s a normal to return to.

Increasingly, there isn’t.

Which is where the reframe becomes urgent. What most companies call resilience is really robustness — hardening targets to withstand shocks so that those targets bounce back quickly. But actual resilience means changing in order to persist. Like communities, ecosystems don’t return to their prior state after major disruption. They transform. Business needs to understand itself the same way.

Soli made a point in our conversation that I keep turning over. The answers to what companies are facing right now are probably sitting in their sustainability teams: Adaptive supply chain strategies, water stewardship in stressed watersheds, circular material sourcing, stakeholder relationships that provide license to operate — this is the work sustainability professionals have been doing for years. But because it was framed as responsibility rather than resilience or risk management, it didn’t always land.

In a volatile world, companies don’t compete on execution alone; they compete on adaptability, i.e., the ability to read changing conditions early and reconfigure faster than rivals. That’s resilience. And resilience, reframed, might be the sustainability argument that finally sticks.

The question is whether sustainability professionals can make that pivot — and whether they’ll get the chance to before the moment passes.

The Two Steps Forward podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and other platforms — and via Trellis. Episodes publish every other Tuesday.