Business Performance & Resilience Business Performance & Resilience Business Performance & Resilience

The digitalisation of all areas of life, the need to operate in a more sustainable and climate-neutral manner, and ongoing technical innovations are changing the business environment - in ever shorter cycles. In addition, the number and severity of crises and disruptions has steadily increased over the last decade: Wars and cyber attacks, protectionist measures, sanctions and counter-sanctions, climate-related natural disasters and global pandemics, among other things, lead to broken supply chains, the unavailability of raw materials and critical components and primary products, and massively rising prices. All this is now part of the "new normal", embedded in geopolitical tensions. These environmental changes create a constant pressure on companies to adapt and require them to prepare for unplanned and unpredictable future events in order to be successful in the long term.

The above-mentioned environmental changes almost always lead to higher costs and declining margins. In order to maintain profitability and competitive position, companies are forced to constantly improve their business performance. This can be achieved through the generation of new sources of revenue, cost reductions, the spin-off or sale of unproductive parts of the company or through digitalisation or automation measures.

Increasing resilience means anticipating possible crises and preparing business models or internal processes and structures for crises in the best possible way in order to achieve the company's goals not only in the short term, but in the long term. For companies, this is usually associated with (initially) rising costs, as greater resilience is possible, for example, by building up redundancies. Resilient companies invest in additional regional production facilities, in sourcing from additional suppliers, in building up buffer stocks, in aligning research and development as well as production with regionally different standards and norms, and in building up new sales markets.

Our survey among executives (download the current CEO Outlook here) shows: a large majority is convinced that success and growth also depend on questioning and breaking through established business models and habitual market mechanisms. Especially now, when companies have to deal with many different challenges, improving performance while increasing resilience is not only a major challenge. Rather, it offers companies the chance to achieve a comparative competitive advantage through the next crisis and thus not only maintain their own market position, but improve it.