Reinventing for resilience: A CEO's guide

To better understand how these companies deliver profitable growth continuously, we used the Accenture Resilience Index to analyze their strengths across three performance dimensions—financial discipline, business capabilities and technology maturity—from the start of 2018 through the third quarter of 2022. The top performers in our analysis stand out in three important ways:

They exhibit strong capabilities across all performance dimensions of the Resilience Index. Nearly half of long-term profitable growth companies achieve higher-than average scores across financial, business and technology dimensions. They also outpace their low-performing peers across all capability areas within each dimension. Every performance dimension—and every capability—is crucial to building resilience.

They are more resilient amid disruption. Long-term profitable growth companies recover faster and emerge stronger after disruption or crisis. We witnessed this before, during and after the pandemic. While long-term profitable growth companies exhibit consistently higher resilience, they actually extended their lead and widened the performance gap during and after that period. Their scores across all dimensions of the Resilience Index also increased. This stands in stark contrast to companies that exhibit low growth and low profitability; these companies saw their performance scores decline in each dimension.

Their strong digital core enables their competitive advantage. Companies achieving long-term profitable growth outscore their low-growth/low-profitability peers by a significant margin when it comes to technology. Their strong digital core—embedded across the enterprise—is a unifying element of superior long-term performance. 

Long-term profitable growth companies display a better balance of strength across the dimensions of the Resilience Index than their low-profitability/low-growth peers. This holds true across all industries. However, this does not mean that the path to long-term profitable growth is uniform. Even the best-performing industries display relative weaknesses across one or more capability areas of the Resilience Index.

For example, software and platform companies that achieve long-term high performance exhibit lower scores in the areas of talent and sustainability. For long-term profitable growth companies in the aerospace and defense sector, customer capabilities are lacking. And for life sciences companies, supply chain and operational issues tend to hold them back. Overcoming those weaknesses can help companies achieve even higher levels of performance and resilience.  

Even more important than industry comparisons are performance comparisons among peers within an industry. Using odds analysis and machine learning, we are able to calculate the likelihood of a company achieving long-term profitable growth. We find that a company has a 70% higher chance of being a long-term profitable growth company if it performs well against its peers than if it does against other industries.