Sustainability, Trust and Resilience: The New Engines of Business Success

The 2026 forecast report by the global consulting and communications firm Weber Shandwick provides an interesting glimpse into how management, boards of directors, and international companies currently understand business success. It is not just growth, speed, or technological innovation, but a deeper combination of resilience, trust, values, and the ability to adapt to a changing reality. This is perhaps one of the biggest changes in the business world in recent years.

In the last decade, we have become accustomed to measuring success primarily through efficiency, size, process acceleration, and performance maximization. However, recent years—characterized by wars, social polarization, supply chain crises, inflation, changing regulations, geopolitical turmoil, and the acceleration of AI usage—have exposed a simple truth: organizations can be very efficient, but at the same time very fragile.

This is exactly where the new understanding sharpens. The successful businesses of the coming years will not necessarily be those that move the fastest, but those that know how to maintain stability within uncertainty. Those that know how to build trust over time, adapt to a changing reality without losing identity, and connect business performance with broader responsibility toward employees, customers, the community, and the environment. Those that will shift thinking from short-term to longer-term time horizons.

The Weber Shandwick report returns again and again to the idea of "trust." Not as an abstract value term or a PR tool, but as a real business asset. In a world characterized by uncertainty, polarization, artificial intelligence, disinformation, and the erosion of trust in institutions, organizations are measured not only by the financial results they present, but also by the degree of consistency, responsibility, and transparency they demonstrate over time.

Trust includes the trust of customers, employees, investors, regulators, and the public in the organization's ability to act fairly, responsibly, and stably even in complex times. In this sense, trust becomes an integral part of opportunity and risk management, organizational resilience, and the ability to generate value over time, as an organization that succeeds in building trust usually also enjoys higher loyalty, better access to capital, a better ability to deal with crises, and broader legitimacy to operate in a changing environment.

This is also true regarding sustainability. In recent years, the term ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) has become a political or ideological term in some places. But beneath the "noise," the business reality itself has not changed. Organizations are still required to deal with climate risks, energy, resources, regulations, employees, supply chains, and public trust. Therefore, sustainability is not a "trend" and not a "department." It is part of the quality of management, culture, and organizational DNA. The meaning is not philanthropy or giving up profitability. On the contrary. It is about understanding that a company that does not see its impacts on the supply chain across all its layers will struggle over time to generate value even for the shareholders themselves.

The report also points to another trend of moving from a focus on messaging to a focus on substance. The public, employees, and investors are no longer satisfied with statements. They examine whether organizations are truly acting in accordance with the values they present. In such a world, "authenticity" is not an image issue but a management test.

And in our day, it is impossible not to address the development of AI and its implications. It is clear that artificial intelligence is changing and will change business models, streamline processes, and accelerate decision-making—but it will also sharpen what cannot be replaced: human judgment, responsibility, understanding complexity, trust, and leadership ability. This is also where the importance of having people "in the loop" and "on the loop" (Human on the Loop and in the Loop) will be expressed.

In an era of technology excess, the competitive advantage may be the human advantage. The ability to hold values even in times of pressure. The ability to generate resilience and not just efficiency. The ability to see beyond the next quarter, and the ability to understand that true business success is measured not only by what the company takes from the world but also by what it gives back to it.

*The author is the Chairman of the Advisory Committee, Arison ESG Center, Reichman University; formerly, the Supervisor of Banks.