Most CEOs think financial risk lives in spreadsheets. But the biggest threats to your balance sheet aren’t in your P&L—they’re in your operations. According to McKinsey, operational failures now account for more than 60% of major corporate losses, yet they're among the least understood by leadership.

 

And here’s the dangerous part:
Operational risks don’t announce themselves. They accumulate quietly.

 

Your business might be running smoothly… until a single vendor collapses, a widely-used SaaS platform goes down, or an undocumented manual process breaks at exactly the wrong time. Suddenly you’re dealing with real financial consequences: stalled revenue, missed SLAs, regulatory exposure, and reputational damage.

 

The crises that hit hardest aren’t dramatic—they’re mundane.
They’re the “We assumed someone handled that…” moments.

 

Smart CEOs treat operational resilience as a strategic asset, not an IT project. That means:

• Mapping critical processes and dependencies

• Validating single points of failure

• Testing what happens when “X goes down”

• Ensuring teams know exactly how to pivot during disruption

• Understanding the real cost of downtime

 

A crisis ignored becomes a crisis paid for later—usually at a premium.

 

Leadership question:
If one operational node failed tomorrow, how quickly would your organization know, respond, and recover?