This episode is based on a column by Susana Quintas, independent non-executive director, first published in Diario Responsable, and it starts with an awkward observation: every sustainability report ever written assumes the company will still be trading.
The numbers say otherwise. According to The State of Resilience 2025, the companies surveyed lose an average of 324 minutes a week to downtime across 86 disruptions a year. Tariffs that eat into the profit and loss account, raw material restrictions that stop factories, cyber attacks that shut down operations. Disruption has become a recurring cost line, and it sits in no ESG framework.
Susana draws a line between endurance and resilience. Endurance means taking the hit. Resilience means learning from it, redesigning what failed and coming out with sharper reflexes. She argues it rests on three muscles trained before they are needed: anticipation looked at across the whole organisation rather than silo by silo, response designed in the cold around a single question – what is our minimum viable business? – and transformation that refuses to return to business as usual once the crisis has passed.
The reframing is the point. Listed companies answer to the market every quarter; family businesses answer to the generations that follow. That longer horizon turns resilience from an operational competence into an intergenerational responsibility, and it hands the board a metric it does not yet report: RoR, the return on resilience.
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