The officer no one can afford to lose – but everyone keeps firing

This is a guest article written by Bill Shireman, CEO of Solution Citizen.

Apple just told you something

In January 2026, Apple quietly eliminated one of the most consequential C-suite roles in American business. Lisa Jackson – former EPA Administrator and for thirteen years Apple's Vice President for Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives — retired. Under her watch, Apple cut its global greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60% and moved hundreds of suppliers onto clean energy.

Apple did not name a replacement. It split her responsibilities between the Chief Operating Officer and an incoming General Counsel hired from Meta's legal team.

Apple is a sophisticated company. It is not abandoning sustainability. It is doing something more revealing: folding environmental resilience into operations and legal compliance, stripping out the dedicated strategic function that made it transformative, and handing the policy dimension to a lawyer. What was a mission is becoming a protocol.

That is not just Apple's story. It is the story of an entire class of corporate leadership being diminished — first by political attack, then by institutional drift, and finally by its own failure to claim the strategic territory it was built for.

How the CSO got kneecapped

The Chief Sustainability Officer was always vulnerable. Born in the early 2000s, the role was tolerated more than embraced. In good times it was celebrated; in bad times it was the first thing jettisoned.

The bad times arrived in 2025. On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order eliminating federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental justice offices, and a second directing agencies to identify investigations targeting large corporations for DEI-related activity. Target, Walmart, Meta, McDonald's, PepsiCo, and Amazon moved within weeks to modify or eliminate diversity and sustainability commitments.

The CSO role — already conflated in corporate minds with DEI and ESG — became politically radioactive. Most companies dissolved the function quietly and called it strategic realignment.

Here is what matters. Sustainability was attacked not because it was bad for business, but because it had been successfully reframed — by its own advocates — as a values project rather than a resilience project. When the CSO spent her energy talking about purpose and planetary health, she spoke a language that could be dismissed as ideology. When the political winds shifted, there was no business-case armor protecting the role. It had never made itself indispensable in the language C-suites and boards actually speak: risk, capital, competitive durability.

The lawyer who colonised strategy

While the CSO was being targeted, the General Counsel was quietly expanding from a defensive function into strategic territory. The reasons were understandable: regulation exploded in complexity, supply chains drew scrutiny, geopolitical risk demanded legal architecture. The GC, trained to map downside scenarios, found herself at the centre of decisions that were, at their core, strategic. In many companies she now functions as a de facto strategic risk officer, present in every existential conversation.

The problem is structural, and it goes deeper than risk-aversion. The GC is, by training and mandate, a feedback-suppression system. When environmental harm or community damage generates signals that threaten the company — lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, activist campaigns — the legal instinct is to suppress the signal. Deploy litigation. Mobilise lobbying. Manage communications. Appear to respond while ensuring nothing fundamental changes.

This is enormously profitable in the short run. Suppressing feedback is cheaper, in any given quarter, than adapting to it, and the GC who neutralises a threat is rewarded immediately while the consequences of suppression are deferred and diffused.

But suppressing feedback does not make the underlying dysfunction disappear. It accumulates. The chemical company that spent 30 years suppressing liability signals eventually faces a reckoning that dwarfs the cost of early adaptation. The social platform that treated community harm as a legal problem rather than a product problem now faces regulation it cannot manage and trust it cannot rebuild. In a linear economy that extracted value from captive systems, feedback suppression was viable. In an interconnected one that routes around dysfunction, it is a slow-motion existential threat.

This is not an argument against lawyers. It is an argument against letting the legal orientation become the strategic orientation of the enterprise. The GC asks: What could hurt us? The company also needs a senior voice asking: Which risks are worth taking, which signals should we be learning from, and how do we build the capacity to thrive in a world that will not hold still? The difference between those questions, multiplied across every major decision, is the difference between adaptive resilience and managed decline.

The resilience gap

Together, the weakened CSO and the feedback-suppressing GC have opened a gap in the corporate structure at precisely the moment the threats most require a dedicated response. Most large companies have no one in the C-suite whose explicit mandate is to ask: What are the scenarios that could end this company, and what would it take to navigate them?

And those scenarios are no longer the bounded risks of previous decades. Climate disruption is real and escalating, but it is now one item on a longer list. AI is restructuring entire industries faster than governance can track. Permanent, technologically mediated warfare is rewiring supply chains, energy markets, and insurance frameworks. The erosion of democratic institutions is creating an environment where regulatory predictability and the basic contract between corporations and communities can no longer be assumed. These are not background conditions; they are the foreground of every major strategic decision.

The CSO was built to manage environmental and social risk in a broadly stable institutional environment. The function we need now must be built for a world in which the institutional environment itself is one of the primary risk variables.

Diversity is a resilience technology

This reframing recasts something both advocates and opponents have mishandled: diversity. For a decade it was framed primarily as an ethical commitment — which made it vulnerable to exactly the political attack it received. If diversity is fundamentally about doing right by underrepresented groups, it is a values programme, and values programmes are the first casualties when pressure mounts.

But the deeper truth is that diverse systems are more resilient than homogeneous ones. This is not a metaphor. Genetic diversity is how biological populations survive disruption: when conditions change, heterogeneous populations already contain individuals adapted to the new conditions, while homogeneous ones collapse. The same dynamic governs organisations. A leadership team of similar backgrounds, training, and cognitive frameworks is exquisitely optimised for the environment that made those frameworks succeed — and brittle in any other. A diverse team processes novel disruptions through multiple frameworks at once; it is more likely to contain someone who saw the signal early.

Diversity, in other words, is not moral overhead. It is adaptive capacity. Companies shedding these functions under political pressure are reducing their resilience at the moment it matters most.

From linear control to circular intelligence

All of this reflects a single underlying shift: the collision between an industrial-era management model and a world that has moved beyond it.

The industrial era produced an architecture optimised for linear, top-down control. A small executive team, operating with high information asymmetry, made centralised decisions that cascaded down through hierarchy. Power was concentrated, feedback filtered, dissent managed. The model maximised profit by extracting value from captive inputs — labour, resources, attention — in an environment assumed to be stable and forgiving. It produced enormous wealth, and enormous deferred costs now coming due at once.

The world we operate in now is circular. Information moves laterally as fast as it moves vertically. Ecosystems push back, communities organize, workers have options, and algorithms amplify feedback faster than any suppression apparatus can match. Hierarchical suppression fails when feedback routes around it. Centralised strategy fails when disruptions are too numerous and heterogeneous for one team to model. What works instead is a distributed, adaptive, intelligence-rich form of management — one that treats feedback as a strategic asset rather than a threat, and resilience as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance cost.

The Chief Resilience Officer is the embodiment of that philosophy at the C-suite level: the institutional argument, in organisational form, that adaptive intelligence is now more valuable than defensive control.

The CRO: Architecture for survival

The Chief Resilience Officer is not a renamed CSO. The title matters. It sits naturally beside CFO, COO, and GC; it carries none of the baggage of "sustainability" or "ESG"; and it signals something forward-facing rather than defensive. Crucially, it positions the function as the structural counterweight to the GC — not managing risk in the legal sense, but building the capacity to thrive amid irreducible risk.

Where the GC suppresses feedback from a disrupted world, the CRO treats those signals as strategic intelligence. She holds the portfolio of civilisational-scale risks the old CSO never quite owned: climate and ecosystem fragility, AI disruption of labour and competitive structure, geopolitical instability, democratic erosion, supply-chain fragility, social trust. And she holds something the GC cannot provide — a mandate for adaptive boldness, grounded in the recognition that in a rapidly changing world the failure to adapt is itself the primary risk.

This is what Apple's restructuring misses. By folding Jackson's function into legal and operations, Apple preserved the outputs of past strategy — the emissions cuts, the supply chain transformations — while eliminating the function that generates foresight about what comes next. It kept the harvest while plowing under the seeds. The CRO plants those seeds. She is the one who asks what the world looks like in 2035, and what the company must be able to do to thrive in it.

Six steps to make the transition

For CSOs and companies serious about this evolution, the path is concrete.

1. Reframe the mandate from sustainability to resilience — lead with business risk and enterprise durability, not environmental outcomes, because resilience is a strategy word and sustainability is a values word.
2. Reposition diversity as a resilience capability and defend it in the language of competitive strategy, where it is far harder to dismiss as ideology.
3. Claim the scenario-planning function before someone else does, making the primary board deliverable a strategic resilience map spanning AI, geopolitics, democratic erosion, and climate — not a sustainability report.
4. Build a direct relationship with the board's risk committee, rather than reaching the room through the General Counsel.
5. Forge an alliance with the CFO by modeling the long-term cost of inaction, positioning the role as the institutional counterweight that maps the cost of not adapting.
6. Change the title — and mean it, because Chief Resilience Officer signals a cross-cutting, existential mandate that Chief Sustainability Officer never could, and the role change is impossible without it.

The larger stakes

Companies are shedding the functions best equipped to navigate a volatile future — partly from political pressure, partly because those functions never earned their strategic credibility, and partly because the gravity of legal conservatism is filling the vacuum. The world those functions were meant to navigate is not getting simpler. AI is restructuring the economy faster than institutions adapt. Permanent warfare is becoming structural. The institutions that made a rules-based global economy possible are under sustained pressure.

When corporations lose the capacity to anticipate civilizational-scale risks, those risks do not disappear. They simply go unmanaged at the level where the resources and leverage to address them actually exist. That is not just bad for business. It is bad for the republic.

The Chief Sustainability Officer was never only about sustainability. At her best, she was about building the institutional adaptive intelligence that lets large organisations — and the societies they are embedded in — survive what is coming. That function needs a new title, a new mandate, and a structural home that no political wind, no earnings miss, and no general counsel can quietly absorb.

Call her the Chief Resilience Officer. And put her in the room.

Bill Shireman is CEO of Solution Citizen, Advisor to EarthX, and Founder of Circle America, an affinity group and campaign for advancing a circular economy and culture. A longtime advocate for market-based approaches to systemic resilience, he has worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and civil society organisations on issues at the intersection of corporate strategy, environmental policy, and democratic renewal.