An executive told me recently that she was tired of hearing about agility. Her company had gone through Covid, a supply disruption, the loss of a major client. She had adapted every time. And yet her teams were exhausted, and so was she.
Her question was the right one: did her company know how to absorb shocks, or was it still standing on its own?
Living systems are not efficient
Olivier Hamant is a biologist, research director at INRAE. In L'entreprise robuste - Pour une alternative à la performance (2025), which extends his essay Antidote au culte de la performance - La robustesse du vivant (Gallimard, Tracts, 2023), he defends an idea that disturbs the corporate world.
He observes that the energy efficiency of photosynthesis is 1%, meaning that plants waste 99% of solar energy. They are not efficient at all. They are robust.
His thesis fits in one sentence: robustness is built on underperformance. It requires room to maneuver, slack in the mechanisms, redundancies, heterogeneity, slowness, errors, imprecision. Exactly everything we spend our time eliminating. Performance, founded on optimization and predictable conditions, narrows the possibilities. Robustness multiplies them.
Applied to business, the observation is harsh. We have spent thirty years eliminating all room to maneuver in the name of efficiency: lean inventories, tightly adjusted headcounts, optimized processes. We have built organizations that are highly efficient and highly fragile.
What Collins found, by a completely different path
Jim Collins is not a biologist. In Good to Great, he reports on a five-year study conducted with his team on more than fourteen hundred companies, to identify the small number that had gone from good to great and understand what set them apart from their direct competitors.
Three of his findings deserve an executive's attention, and they point in the same direction as Hamant.
The first is the flywheel. Collins compares transformation to a two-and-a-half-ton metal disk being pushed: each push barely moves it, but after thousands of steady turns, the momentum becomes irresistible. The shift from good to great never results from a single decision, a grand program, or a major innovation. It is Hamant's slowness, put in management terms.
The second is Level 5 leadership. Unlike charismatic, high-profile executives, the leaders of companies that became great combined deep personal humility with fierce professional will, and channeled their ambition toward the company rather than toward their own ego. Collins insists this is an empirical finding, not an ideological stance.
The third is discipline. Collins structures his model around three levels: disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action. And disciplined thought begins with confronting the brutal facts. An executive who does not want to see the real state of their company will never make it robust.
Where they disagree
And this is where it gets interesting.
The hedgehog concept, Collins's central strategic framework, calls for finding the intersection of three circles: what you can be the best in the world at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about. He even specifies that you must identify what you cannot be the best at.
Being the best in the world. That is an injunction to optimize — exactly what Hamant warns against. Collins asks you to focus, to eliminate what falls outside the three circles, to align the company around a single concept. Hamant says that is precisely what makes a system fragile: without redundancy or heterogeneity, a system does not survive fluctuations.
Both are right, and they are not talking about the same thing. Collins studies American companies over a period of growth. Hamant reasons about living systems, on the scale of millions of years and major crises. One describes how you become great. The other, how you avoid dying.
A distinction that matters
Robustness and agility are often set against each other. That is a misreading. For Hamant, robustness consists of keeping the system stable despite fluctuations: adaptability is part of it, not its enemy.
The image of the body makes this clear. Bone strength is robustness. Muscle flexibility is agility. No one would say you have to choose: a skeleton without muscle goes nowhere, a muscle without a skeleton cannot stand.
So what stands in opposition to robustness is not flexibility. It is optimization. And the link runs even deeper: the ability to change does not weaken an organization, it strengthens it. When the context has changed, the old equilibrium is no longer tenable, and wanting to return to it is a costly illusion. A company that knows how to transform itself is one that reaches a new equilibrium, as solid as the previous one, adapted to what the world has become.
Where I stand between the two
An executive at an SME or mid-sized company cannot give up on performance. There are customers, salaries to pay, a bank on the other side of the table, and often a shareholder watching the quarters. Saying to abandon the cult of performance is intellectually correct and operationally unworkable.
But neither can the hedgehog concept be applied to the letter, concentrating everything on a single concept, because a company with only one market, one product, and one major client is a one-shot company.
So the useful question lies elsewhere: where can I afford to be robust without ceasing to be efficient? There is no general answer. It has to be worked out company by company.
Three questions to ask yourself
What has held up in your company for ten years, without anyone touching it?
That is probably your real robustness. You don't recognize it as such because it doesn't appear in any metric, and it seems self-evident to you. Start by naming it before looking for what is missing.
What happens in your company if a key person leaves tomorrow?
The answer usually comes very quickly, and it points to your real breaking point. A fully optimized organization no longer has any redundancy, and the redundancy that was removed is only noticed the moment it would have been needed.
Do your teams have something that does not move?
They are asked to adapt, again, and often rightly so. But without a fixed point — a purpose, values genuinely upheld, a direction that doesn't change every six months — constant adaptation becomes exhaustion. That is exactly what was at stake in the case of the executive I mentioned at the start.
A useful image
In physics, a distinction is made between stable equilibrium — a ball at the bottom of a basin — and unstable equilibrium — a ball at the top of a hill. Both are equilibria. One holds against the first gust of wind, the other does not.
A company transformation is the passage from one equilibrium to another. The context has changed, the market has changed, the old basin no longer exists. The question, then, is not whether to return to where you were, but whether the organization arrives in a new basin, as stable as the previous one, or ends up balanced at the top of a hill, held up only by the strain of its teams.
That is what distinguishes a successful transformation from an endured one. Both produce change. Only one produces solidity.
What I take from this
I led a company for seventeen years, several of them under LBO, in an environment that demanded quarterly performance. I know what constant optimization costs, and I also know what a team that stays standing when everything is shifting is worth.
The executive who asked me her question eventually found her answer. Her company knew how to adapt. What it lacked was something to hold onto while it adapted.
Olivier Hamant, L'entreprise robuste - Pour une alternative à la performance, 2025, and Antidote au culte de la performance - La robustesse du vivant, Gallimard, collection Tracts, 2023. Jim Collins, Good to Great, Pearson.
%20(2)%20(2).png)
.png)
.png)
.png)