The chief executive exists so that the board has one person answerable for the whole of execution. Spreading executive accountability across a team sounds collegial but leaves the board negotiating with a committee when results disappoint. Concentrating it in the CEO gives owners a single point of accountability for performance, and that includes the resilience of operations, not only their profitability. A company that earns well but cannot survive a disruption is not being run well.
The CEO's mandate comes from the board through appointment and a delegation of authority, and the reporting duty back to the board is fixed in the board charter and the annual calendar. In a crisis the CEO either leads the strategic crisis team or appoints its leader and stays accountable for the outcome. A practical example: after a near-miss outage, the CEO mandates impact tolerances for critical services, assigns executive owners and puts recovery readiness on the executive committee agenda every quarter. Resilience gains real traction the moment the CEO treats it as a management discipline rather than a compliance topic.
The typical failure is delegation mistaken for discharge: the CEO hands continuity to a mid-level coordinator, considers the topic closed and rediscovers it during an incident, in front of the board. Work can be delegated; accountability to the board cannot. Boards should test this by asking the CEO, not the coordinator, to explain the state of resilience. The CEO's role in resilience governance is a core thread of ERGP module M1, Resilience governance and the board.
This term is part of the working language of ERGP — the first resilience governance certification fully available in Arabic, also in English. 94 chapters, six modules, a verifiable certificate.
Explore the ERGP programme