Harvard Business Review LogoMay 21, 2026Artur Debat/Getty ImagesWhen disruption strikes a modern enterprise, the greatest damage often comes not from the initial event but from how failures spread through connected systems. A technical fault takes down digital infrastructure. That outage halts operations, delays products and services, and disrupts customers. Financial losses and regulatory consequences follow. Each failure may start in a specific system, but its effects spread across entire organizations.
The Case for Hiring a Chief Resilience Officer
There’s a major governance gap inside most organizations: No single executive is accountable for coordinating enterprise-wide resilience and recovery when failures cascade across functions. That’s why comapnies such as CrowdStrike, Goldman Sachs, Novo Nordisk, and Allianz have created a chief resilience officer (CResO) role responsible for aligning continuity planning, recovery objectives, crisis response, and organizational learning across the enterprise. The creation of this role is a recognition that resilience should be treated not as a narrow operational or risk-management issue but as a core leadership capability that protects revenue, preserves stakeholder trust, and enables companies to recover faster and perform better under sustained disruption.
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