In a few days, billions of people will tune in to watch the world’s top athletes compete in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. I’ll be one of them, cheering on the likes of US gymnastics star Simone Biles, Japanese tennis sensation Naomi Osaka, French swimming phenom Leon Marchand and other world-class athletes who have, or soon will, become household names.
We as business leaders can take, and always have taken, cues from sports, whether in terms of drive and focus, competition and collaboration, strategy and creativity. However, this year, I’m particularly excited to tune in and watch these remarkable athletes and their thousands of co-competitors perform, because their lessons in resilience are profound as well.
Many happy returns
Business leaders have long understood the value of resilience. But they haven’t been measuring that value. And they’ve been locked in a mindset that equated resilience to risk mitigation. Accenture’s recent research confirms resilience is actually much more than that—it’s a team sport characterized by a set of capabilities that, together, serve as a winning combination that can lead to revenue growth and profitability.
This new definition allows leaders to not only measure resilience, but also tackle it in a new way. Still, that doesn’t make it easier to achieve. In fact, we found that only 15% of companies can be considered highly resilient. They earn that distinction by outperforming their industry peers in six critical areas measured by the Accenture Resilience Index (RI): financial solvency, sales, technology, global operations, talent and sustainability.
Balancing and sustaining their investments in these building blocks of resilience make all the difference. The resilience leaders generate a notable “return on resilience,” particularly over the long run. Three years from now, on average, the most resilient companies we identified are expected to achieve a compound annual revenue growth rate (CAGR) that is 6 percentage points higher than their industry peers and profit margins that are 8 percentage points higher.
Interestingly, a company’s resilience today is highly predictive of future financial performance and is core to continuous reinvention. For today’s high performers, the predictive accuracy of their resilience index score is 82% when looking three years ahead. For companies that are currently exhibiting low growth and low profitability, the lesson is just as compelling: By investing more than their peers in a balanced way across the resilience dimensions, these lackluster performers have the chance to leapfrog to the top quartile of financial performance going forward.
Tech + Talent: The winning combination
From the earliest running shoe designs to Hawkeye sensors in tennis, or the ever-evolving track and field material science; each lap and each jump that world-class athletes take at the highest stage of sports is testament to the incredible resilience and drive they wield, coupled with a deep synergy between their immense human talent and technological innovation. Their return on resilience is drawn from that unique combination. Wherever you look, resilience is complex, multidimensional, and tied to the human spirit.
In the business world, we found from our research that all dimensions of resilience are important. The greater the number of resilience capabilities a company invests in, the greater the chances of that company sustaining long-term performance across disruptive business cycles. And notably, we found that a combination of strengths in technology and talent, AKA people, is a unique enabler of long-term performance.
The power of that combination makes sense. We know that technologies such as cloud, data and AI are critical to creating the flexibility and new ways of working that resilience requires. But we also know that
focusing on technology will only take a company so far. Because it is the talent—the human skill, determination, intuition experience and ingenuity—that unlocks its full potential. The combination of the two amplifies the value of each.
The strength of this combination has been validated even further with the emergence of generative AI, which more than 80% of business leaders now see as a key lever in their reinvention strategy. And it’s not just leaders, it’s also most of their competition. Those trailing see the technology as a way to level the playing field on resilience – and future performance – potentially enabling them to not only match, but likely leapfrog, the current advantage of those dragging their feet after a jump out of the starting gates.
Going for gold
Having the right combination technology and talent capabilities is actually very rare. Just over a quarter of companies in our sample scored high in both dimensions. These are the companies that increased their probability of becoming a long-term profitable growth company by a factor of four. What’s true in the boardroom is also true on the track and on the field.
The Paris Olympics will feature more than 10,000 athletes competing in 32 different sports but only 329 gold medals will be awarded. Olympians that have devoted their lives to the craft the pain, the focus, and the resilience of doing it rain or shine, day and night deserve our collective attention and indeed, admiration. These elite athletes inspire us. They remind us why resilience is such a powerful and necessary force.
I’m excited to tune in for the Games and root for the athletes behind the flags, the humans with near super-human might. The lessons they show us on where the future of performance can go will be invaluable.
