Profiting from the Relationship Between Resilience and Growth

Resilience is the key to driving a company’s long-term profitable growth, according to new research at Accenture that was designed to measure the connection between corporate resilience and the ability to create value. After analyzing the performance of 1,615 of the world’s largest publicly traded companies across 18 industries with their Resilience Index, the authors found that only 52 per cent of high-performing companies—those with above-peer-set revenue growth and profitability—outpaced their peers continuously through the business cycle running from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2023. The authors’ research showed that companies need a holistic vision and investment strategy for resilience, which they define as the capability to cope with and capitalize on fast-changing markets. They found evidence that a combination of financial and non-financial strengths captured in their Resilience Index—such as a company’s ability to hire talent and invest in technological innovations—drive and predict long-term high performance. Companies with the highest ratings across all the Resilience Index’s dimensions had the strongest performance. In addition, the authors discovered that companies that build a resilience-focused culture while investing in multiple resilience-enhancing capabilities and developing the talent needed to unlock the potential of new technologies have faster-growing revenue and profit margins over the long term.

• corporate resilience, high-performance companies, revenue growth strategies, driving profitability