UMass Boston Professor Makes the Case for a New C-Suite Role: The Chief Resilience Officer
When a single software update can ground airlines, halt hospital systems, and cascade across global supply chains, most organizations discover too late that no one executive is truly accountable for enterprise-wide recovery. A Harvard Business Review article co-authored by College of Management Professor Jeffrey M. Keisler argues that companies need a dedicated Chief Resilience Officer (CResO) to close this critical governance gap.
Modern enterprises already employ risk, security, operations, and continuity teams. Yet these functions typically operate in silos. When disruptions spread across technology, operations, finance, and third-party partners, as seen in the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that affected an estimated 8.5 million devices, recovery becomes uneven and prolonged precisely because no single leader owns the end-to-end response. Keisler and colleagues show that resilience is no longer an operational afterthought; it is a strategic governance function that determines whether an organization can keep performing under pressure.
The article, “The Case for Hiring a Chief Resilience Officer,” published in May, is co-authored by Abhilash Panda and Erick Ariel Gonzales Rocha of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Gianluca Pescaroli of University College London, Jeffrey M. Keisler of UMass Boston, Elizaveta Pinigina and Benjamin D. Trump of Dara Systems, and Igor Linkov of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.
Keisler is a professor in the College of Management whose research focuses on decision analysis, risk, and resilience governance.
“We’re proud to see Professor Keisler’s insights reach decision-makers at the highest levels,” said Dean of the College of Management Venky Venkatachalam. “His work is helping organizations rethink how they prepare for and recover from the disruptions that define today’s operating environment.”
Key Research Findings
The authors document a structural gap inside most organizations: while specialized leaders manage threats, security, and compliance, none is charged with ensuring that critical functions can be restored as an integrated system when failures cascade. Drawing on examples from technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and a growing United Nations-backed network of corporate resilience officers, the article shows that leading firms are already formalizing the CResO role.
Companies such as CrowdStrike, State Street, Goldman Sachs, Allianz Commercial, and Novo Nordisk have appointed resilience leaders who report to the CEO or other senior executives. These roles set organization-wide resilience standards, align recovery objectives across functions, map critical dependencies, and report performance directly to the board. The CResO does not replace existing risk or continuity teams; it integrates them so that the enterprise can detect, respond, and recover faster while turning each disruption into institutional learning.
Organizations seeking to strengthen resilience leadership should:
- Establish clear accountability for enterprise resilience at the C-suite or senior executive level.
- Define recovery objectives for critical functions and ensure those objectives are tested and resourced across operational, technological, and supply-chain boundaries.
- Equip the resilience office with authority to set standards, coordinate crisis protocols, and report metrics such as time-to-detect and time-to-recover to the CEO and board.
- Treat resilience spending as an investment that protects revenue and stakeholder confidence rather than as overhead.
The authors conclude that disruption is now a permanent feature of organizational life. Companies that assign ownership of resilience are better positioned to sustain operations, limit losses, and emerge stronger after every shock.
The full article is available here.
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