Aon CEO Greg Case recently sat down with management consulting firm McKinsey and Company at its virtual leaders’ summit recently to discuss resilience.

“Resilience is typically defined as a defensive capability that’s needed to ‘protect the house,’” Case said. “At Aon, we consider resilience a company-building capability, which is a fundamentally different orientation. We define resilience as the ability to take actions at scale that simultaneously defend the house and build the house, and we’ve seen many opportunities to do both during volatile times.”

During this time of increasing risk—marked by protracted pandemic-related impacts, rising geopolitical tensions, expanding cyber threats, talent market upheavals and more—senior leaders are sharpening their focus on resilience.

“Within months of the first case of COVID-19, companies of all sizes and in every global region were confronting unprecedented volatility,” Case said. “This prompted many leaders to deeply consider, perhaps for the first time, the true implications of other long-tail risks. Climate risk, for example, has been on our radar for a long time, but the pandemic’s profound impact on supply chains laid bare what can happen when a massive disruption takes place.”

Read the full interview on McKinsey and Company's site and check out additional coverage in Risk.net and Inside P&C.