Boards must build resilience for turbulent times

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This year’s National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Summit was all about uncertainty and pressure.

You could see it in the session titles alone: Navigating Leadership Transitions in Volatile Times. Board Governance Under Uncertainty. Crucible Boards: Building Boards that Deliver When the Stakes Are High. Managing a New Wave of Reputational Risks.

Boards face myriad and overlapping challenges, from AI adoption and cybersecurity threats to geopolitical instability. Directors already have significant time commitments—around 300-plus hours per year per board, NACD President and CEO Peter Gleason said in a keynote. And that will likely increase.

“You’re going to spend even more time overseeing issues like supply chain disruption, economic volatility, shifting politics, regulations, and labor markets,” Gleason told board members.

Building resilience: Gleason stressed the need for boards and executives to cultivate flexibility, agility, and trust to help their companies weather the challenges. Boards can build resilience by “anchoring ourselves in practices and structures that we design and control,” Gleason said. It’s not just about “getting through the moment,” he said, but “building muscle, creative problem-solving, and thinking strategically, thoroughly understanding the risks and threats while spotting opportunities.”

The “building blocks” of resilience, he said, include “sheer perseverance.” He quoted one of the Rocky movies, a favorite of his: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

Trust and values provide a north star: The need to build trust between boards and CEOs was also the theme of the NACD’s Blue Ribbon Commission report. When CEOs trust their boards and have “confidence that they can tap into their board…expertise,” NACD board member Dona Young said, “that unlocks an entirely different relationship which builds alignment and enables boards to walk the journey together with the CEO.” Boards and executives must be prepared for novel challenges to arise, and “the best way to be prepared for those moments is to have a collaborative relationship,” she said.

In the same session, NACD chair Mary Winston reiterated the bedrocks of a strong organization: “With so many priorities landing on our agendas, culture and trust are truly the foundation of strong work performance and value creation.”

And when an audience member asked how companies can show courage when their values are tested, Wayne Peacock, co-chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission, referenced famed author Clayton Christensen’s (The Innovator’s Dilemma) belief that you should be “committed to your values 100% of the time, because…there’s no opportunity for drift.”

Companies need to “be explicit about values, to set high standards for living up to those values and to not tolerate deviation from them in exchange for maybe short-term results,” Peacock said, adding, “That’s really hard to do, but in the long run, that pays tremendous dividends.”

Dealmaking as a means of building resilience: Anu Aiyengar, global head of advisory and M&A at JPMorgan, brought up another path to institutional resilience: dealmaking. Companies are making acquisitions to help solve strategic problems, she said. They’re also conducting deals that will help them to grow, as having scale “make[s] your own earning stream more predictable by having more control over your supply chain, by having AI capabilities before you get disrupted by a competitor,” she said.

Companies’ desire for scale is reflected in this year’s deals market, Aiyengar said. So far in 2025, after six weeks of a “standstill” following the tariffs in April, companies started making deals again, especially “megadeals,” she said. She described an attitude of “you know what, I cannot afford to sit still.”