by Radu Magdin
The world today is such a field: public debt has climbed to record highs, inflation remains elevated owing to intertwined international and domestic factors, and governments face constant pressure to keep budget deficits in check. Political instability and eroding business confidence compound these macroeconomic headwinds. This is not a one‑off crisis. It is a condition that no leader can ignore.
This reality could be read as a bleak diagnosis. I see it differently: as a selection test. Difficult environments do not destroy competent companies; they separate them from those that have survived thus far through favourable circumstances rather than solid organisation. What follows is an analysis of this separation: what companies and leaders who not only endured crises but emerged from them stronger than before have done differently.
Across the world, executives have repeatedly proven their ability to absorb shocks that more stable markets might have felt far more acutely. Through energy crises, pandemics and successive political turbulence, business‑confidence indices have functioned as faithful barometers of these leaders’ resilience. Yet recent readings capture sharp drops in sentiment, underscoring how no sector currently reaches optimistic territory and executives express greater control over their own companies than over the broader economy. In other words, there is raw material for resilience, but also a clear warning that the calibrated optimism of previous years can no longer be assumed.
Resilience is often confused with endurance. They are not the same thing. Endurance is the passive attribute of resilience, the ability to absorb shocks. Full resilience is active: you adapt, recalibrate and move on. In a world where disruptions are no longer exceptions but part of the environment, the distinction matters enormously: it is not just about surviving the storm, but about refitting your ship while still at sea.
This is not a challenge unique to any one country. Nations across Eastern and Southern Europe have had to navigate simultaneously through post‑communist transition, high inflation, fiscal pressure and institutional fragility. Poland, the Czech Republic and Greece have gone through variations of the same challenge, and their business communities have developed practices that warrant close examination.
The Polish case is perhaps the most instructive. CCC, one of the country’s largest shoe retailers, used the COVID‑19 lockdowns to complete a transformation from traditional retail to an omnichannel operation built on cloud infrastructure. The crisis compressed a multiyear change programme into a few months, removing the organisational inertia that normally resists disruption. Poland’s start‑up ecosystem has also thrived, fuelled not only by external capital but by experienced founders who, after successfully exiting their own companies, reinvest in the next generation as investors, mentors and advisers. Many countries boast diasporas of successful entrepreneurs who could play exactly the same role for their home markets.
Research on Polish manufacturing firms in the period 2008‑2012 showed that those most likely to continue innovating after a crisis were the ones that maintained their investments in research and development and marketing throughout the downturn. Among all factors analysed, sustained financing was the strongest predictor of continued innovation. Cutting the activities that generate future competitiveness to protect short‑term margins typically leads to a recovery that starts from a weaker position.
Studies of Greek small and medium‑sized enterprises that survived a decade of financial crisis showed that neither entrepreneurial orientation—risk‑taking, proactivity and innovation—nor market orientation—client focus and competitive awareness—was sufficient on its own. The companies that endured consistently combined both. Those that kept their attention on customers and competitors while remaining willing to take calculated risks were structurally better positioned for adaptation.
A McKinsey analysis of European firms during the 2007‑2008 financial crisis identified three common elements of resilient businesses: faster and more decisive productivity moves without sacrificing growth capacity, greater balance sheet flexibility, and rapid divestments during crises followed by equally swift acquisitions as conditions improved. Many CEOs are incremental in restructuring decisions. Such caution preserves short‑term stability but often means missing the window when change is least costly and easiest to implement.
The classic risk‑management approach was a quarterly exercise: a risk register, a compliance officer, a polished document and everyone slept soundly. That model is obsolete. In a polycrisis environment, risk must migrate from a document to a discipline, from an annual exercise to a weekly rhythm. Executives who build routines of horizon scanning, foresight drills and deliberate hypothesis testing do not aim to predict the future. Their goal is to shorten the interval between surprise and response. That is the key indicator of an organisation resilient to risk.
Latin America offers parallels that are all the more instructive because conditions have often been harsher. Companies there have had to operate through decades of hyperinflation, repeated currency crises, political instability and institutional volatility that exceed anything most leaders have ever experienced. The strategies they developed under those conditions offer concrete lessons.
Argentinian firms that survived recurrent hyperinflation integrated pricing into the daily rhythm of management: weekly review cycles, simplified approval chains and sales teams trained to communicate price changes clearly and promptly. These companies understood that client trust is not built by keeping prices steady but by being transparent and consistent about how and why prices change. In an environment where inflation remains elevated, such vulnerabilities are avoidable. When inflation in Argentina exceeded 160 percent in 2023, some companies began paying part of employees’ compensation in stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, effectively protecting workers’ real incomes from peso depreciation. Executives facing sustained inflation can apply the same logic, even if not the same mechanism: inflation‑linked pay adjustments, subsidised transport and meals, medical coverage and profit‑sharing schemes that maintain the real value of remuneration without locking in large fixed‑cost increases in base salaries.
Brazil’s fintech sector became internationally competitive precisely because the domestic environment was extremely demanding. High interest rates, inflation and currency volatility forced founders to build efficient products, adopt capital‑efficient growth strategies and develop commercial discipline from the start. Nubank, now the largest neobank in the world outside Asia with more than 100 million clients in Brazil alone, emerged from those conditions, not despite them. Companies from other markets that internationalise can tell the same story: they were built and tested in demanding domestic arenas. This is a credible argument for multinational clients seeking reliable partners in emerging Europe. Brazil’s instant payment system Pix reduced the share of cash in consumer transactions from roughly 42 percent in 2020 to 22 percent in 2023. Every converted transaction generated data, and that data became the raw material for better credit scores, fraud detection and product development. Companies that continue to operate through cash or manual invoicing are invisible to the data economy.
The deepest lesson from Latin America is structural: companies that treated cyclical recoveries as proof of structural health failed to systematically build the reserves and capabilities needed for the next shock. Executives face the same temptation. The current combination of fiscal imbalance, high debt and political uncertainty is not a temporary phenomenon but a recurrent one and a structural condition of doing business. There are also relevant signals for companies intersecting with the defence industry: manufacturers that pivoted quickly into defence niches during geopolitical tensions turned proximity to a difficult environment into a real commercial advantage as Europe’s defence market restructures.
The practical agenda for executives is not complicated, even if it is demanding. A few priorities merit special attention.
Business‑model reinvention must precede market pressure, not follow it. Surveys make this point clearly: companies need to set clear priorities for reinvention, reallocate resources among units and encourage innovation to meet shifting client needs. Those that waited for a crisis to force action recovered systematically more slowly than those that had already started. The adoption of AI tools is only half the story. The more pressing gap is in training: many firms that adopt AI report serious difficulties in getting employees to use it effectively. Buying technology without investing in the people who will use it creates costs, not advantages. To this problem we must add the chronic underinvestment in cyber security for new solutions, including the lack of a security culture.
Another essential issue is business continuity through an executive‑succession policy. Only a minority of family‑owned companies worldwide have a formal succession plan, even though many founders expect to retire within a few years. A company whose continuity depends entirely on a single person is inherently fragile. Formal succession structures, documented decision authorities and tested crisis protocols constitute a basic infrastructure that most organisations still neglect. Three words separate resilient organisations from the rest: clarity, continuity and courage. Clarity means that in times of maximum noise the leader reduces ambiguity; even saying “here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t” is a form of leadership. Continuity means that the organisation maintains operations even when the strategy changes, and that depends on processes, people and culture, not on a single person. Courage—the most underestimated of the three—means that resilience is not defensive: sometimes it requires unpopular decisions taken early.
Diversifying revenues and expanding internationally reduce exposure to volatile home environments, where fiscal policy, regulatory changes and political instability can rapidly alter working conditions for companies. Entrepreneurs often fear international expansion, seeing only the risks, while neglecting the risks of remaining wholly dependent on a single market. In an era of AI‑generated narratives and weaponised perception, reputation is the organisation’s oxygen. Mismanaged, it suffocates you in 48 hours. Companies that internationalise must understand that reputation is not improvised; it is governed. Being good is not enough; you have to be consistently credible to multiple audiences under pressure.
Many executives cite regulation as an obstacle to reinventing business models. Resilient leaders engage in dialogue with policymakers, individually and through business associations, proposing functional alternatives rather than merely complaining about inefficiencies.
Developing skills and human capital has become a top concern for foreign investors. Emigration of skilled labour continues to deprive many countries of educated workers, but executives who build working environments that attract returning diaspora can turn a national problem into a competitive advantage. A dimension that remains systematically underappreciated in many companies is crisis communication: not marketing communication, but operational communication addressed internally and externally during moments of maximum pressure. Resilient leaders do not communicate more in a crisis; they communicate differently: calmly, precisely and proportionately. The formula is simple yet rare: where we are, what we know, what we do, what’s next. This structure gives people orientation. Teams do not demand certainty; they ask to know that someone sees the whole picture and has a plan. Silence in crisis is not prudence. It is a vacuum that someone else will fill, usually with rumours or fear.
Global research on firm survival during the COVID‑19 shock showed that cash reserves, knowledge assets, cross‑border sales and access to external capital markets were the most reliable predictors of resilience worldwide. Companies that maintain small cash buffers, depend on a single domestic bank and have no export revenues structurally have fewer options when conditions worsen. Building financial flexibility in good times is cheaper than seeking it in hard times. And when conditions deteriorate, the most difficult competence for a CEO comes to the fore: deciding under uncertainty. The best leaders do not decide because they have all the information; they decide because they know what minimal level of information is sufficient to act. A real danger, especially in mature organisations, is overanalysis: the forty‑third presentation, the ninth memo, the sixth committee and no decision. The solution is not to decide anyway; it is to decide in advance what decision needs to be made, by when and with what minimum information threshold. And to name the person who decides, to avoid diffused responsibility.
Countries and companies that have navigated these challenges well share one common characteristic: their leaders decided early that difficulty is a condition of the market, not an aberration. Leaders who make the same choice today will find themselves in a more solid position than those who wait for things to settle down. The old recovery model (crisis, response, return to normal) is obsolete. The old “normal” no longer awaits us. The new model is crisis, response, operational continuity and then relaunch with a more refined proposition than before. Any serious crisis is also a structural radiography: it reveals what was already fragile, outdated and vulnerable. The resilient leader does not treat recovery as a return to normal but as a relaunch. The question is not “how do we return to normal?” but “what is our new normal, and are we the ones defining it?”
Debates among top executives increasingly reflect this shift. For nearly a decade, frameworks like B.A.N.I. (brittle, anxious, non‑linear, incomprehensible) offered a vocabulary for the world in which companies operate. Many leaders now argue that this moment calls for a compass for action, not a more refined diagnosis of imbalance. One such compass is R.I.S.E.: resilient, intelligent, strategic, ethical. These four words are not aspirational. Resilience means transformation through disruption, not merely surviving it. Intelligence means human judgment exercised where algorithms stop. Strategic thinking means building long‑term advantage instead of managing the urgency of the day. Ethical conduct means power exercised responsibly at a time when trust in business is a fragile asset and, precisely for that reason, valuable. This transition is not a conceptual exercise. The old manuals no longer work, and the speed at which conditions change exceeds any plan built on the assumption of stability.
I propose a different vision: the CEO who is resilient because they have combined the best of local ingenuity and ambition with good practices, examples and methods from elsewhere. There is a recurring temptation, especially in volatile environments, to treat moments of relative stability as a deserved reward and thus to let down one’s guard. The history of companies that have traversed long cycles of uncertainty shows that this temptation is the most costly strategic error. Relative stability is not the pause between crises. It is the window in which to build the capacity to traverse the next crisis from a better position.
Resilience is not a character trait. It is the result of decisions made before pressure arrives. Leaders who navigate hard periods well are not braver than others, not more talented and not luckier. They built earlier: financial reserves, redundant systems, teams capable of functioning without a single point of failure, risk‑anticipation routines and a reputation solid enough to withstand the first blast. The human and entrepreneurial resource for that type of leadership exists everywhere. Whether it is fully harnessed depends largely on the quality of the decisions leaders make now, before pressure imposes them.
*Radu is CEO, Smartlink Communications
By: N. Peter Kramer
