The corporate world was built on a dogma: the principle of performance. Faster, more optimized, more efficient—always pushing for more. But in a world in flux, this model becomes a trap. The accelerating pace of crises—climatic, economic, and geopolitical—weakens over-optimized companies that cannot absorb shocks. Nature teaches us another way: robustness.
You’ve optimized everything. On paper, your company checks all the boxes: it’s modern, agile, and ready for anything. And yet… you can feel it—everything is still just as complicated. All it would take is one crisis, one unexpected event, one supplier failing, and suddenly panic would set in. Your teams scramble, processes turn into obstacles, and the agility you thought you had vanishes like a mirage.
Why? Because you’ve mistaken optimization for robustness, flexibility for instability, and risk management for red tape. You aimed to make your company more efficient… but in reality, you’ve made it more fragile. It’s time to quit racing toward disaster under the illusion that you’re speeding up. Here are five key tools to help you rethink your model—before you’re forced to.
Based on
L’Entreprise robuste by Olivier Charbonnier, Olivier Hamant et Sandra Enlart. Odile Jacob, 2025.
1. Optimize or adapt?
Your obsession with efficiency is making you weaker In response to economic instability and repeated crises, you’ve built strategies to absorb shocks. You’ve outsourced, automated, and streamlined your processes. And what’s the result? A hyper-optimized organization stretched to breaking point, where even the slightest disruption can bring everything to a halt. Recent crises have made it clear: over-reliance on global supply chains, strained suppliers, and just-in-time logistics turns every disruption into chaos. The moment something falls out of line—a supply chain crisis, geopolitical tension, or talent shortage—cracks appear in your rigid system. In the pursuit of optimization, you’ve eliminated your room for maneuver.
Instead of building true resilience, your organization clings desperately to fragile flexibility. It’s performing a juggling act rather than preparing for instability, undermining its ability to absorb shocks. A robust organization isn’t one that functions perfectly when everything is running smoothly—it’s one that holds up when things fall apart.
Take a tip from nature: Bring flexibility back into your organization It’s time to rethink your approach: maximum efficiency shouldn’t be the goal, but rather a balance. Resilience isn’t built on relentless optimization, but through robustness. And robustness means embracing uncertainty, incorporating buffer zones, and designing organizations that can withstand shocks instead of chasing a perfection that doesn’t exist.
Action Plan : Identify your weak spots and strengthen them
Retain core skills in-house: Stop outsourcing everything, and ensure redundancy in key roles to avoid being caught off-guard by people leaving or crises.
Embrace strategic inefficiencies: Create buffers that prevent you from being blindsided. Design a modular organization that can operate in degraded mode without grinding to a halt.
She spent 12 years in industry, working for Bolloré Technologies, among others. She co-founded Business Digest in 1992 and has been running the company since 1998. And she took the Internet plunge in 1996, even before coming on board as part of the BD team.
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