Melbourne’s Chief Resilience Officer Toby Kent, for many years one of the world leaders we most admire, has been named Chair of the Future Business Council. We completely agree that the focus of corporate strategy has to be on resilience, the ability to recover and thrive through uncertainty. According to Kent,

[A]lthough sustainability and resilience overlap, the difference between the two is that “resilience is more acknowledging that something will go wrong along the way”.

He says that “large corporate actors need to recognise this” and that those on the front foot are already starting to react.

“When people talk about the future of business… the hard-nosed bit is in the numbers.

“The way that we are continuing to produce and consume – it is a mathematical equation that we are using resources faster than we can replenish them – there is nothing more hard-nosed than a business thinking about how we are going to exist, as individual businesses and as a society as a whole.”

He says that “resilience is about the ability to adapt, to survive, and to thrive in the face of acute stresses and shocks”, and that the “opportunity is in the ‘thrive’ space”.

Source: Resilience star Toby Kent appointed new Future Business Council chair