Are you the “geopolitics person” at work?

A simple way to help your organisation stay on top of geopolitics

Atelier J. de la Baume-Dürrbach, Guernica, 1955, tapestry after Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, commissioned by Nelson A. Rockefeller; United Nations Headquarters, New York.

Hello from Paris,

As a subscriber to Geopolitical Dispatch, there is every chance you are the “geopolitics person” at your work.

You follow the world closely. You know geopolitics matters. You can see that international political events are increasingly affecting your organisation in ways that are difficult to interpret and even harder to respond to. You probably also suspect that your organisation is not fully prepared for the world that seems to be emerging. And you’re almost certainly not alone in your organisation.

That is not unusual. Few organisations need convincing that the world has become more contested, complicated and less compatible with normal corporate planning assumptions. Tariffs, sanctions, energy prices, fuel costs, supply-chain disruptions and political instability are now affecting companies in ways few leadership teams were trained to think about. The Iran war has made that plain.

The harder task is working out what actually matters and what to do about it. The news cycle is relentless. Propaganda, misinformation and a fragmented, sensational and politicised media landscape make sober analysis harder than ever. There is no shortage of commentary, reporting, dashboards, data feeds and digital snake oil. But often more means less: more information but less judgment; more noise but less signal; more analysis but less action.

Not everyone gets it

Our survey of more than 350 chief executives, published earlier this week, showed that 100% of CEOs are more concerned about geopolitics than they were six months ago, with 78% saying they are “much more concerned”.

Yet most organisations have not built any meaningful response. In that same survey, only 12% of chief executives said geopolitical risk was a core part of strategic planning. More than half said geopolitics was not a regular input into planning or board decision-making at all. And only 1% had created or expanded a dedicated geopolitical capability.

That gap is the problem. Different teams follow different sources. Few organisations have anyone responsible for geopolitics, let alone accountable for it. Boards are often briefed only once an issue has become urgent or a risk has become material. The result is fragmented understanding: leadership teams working off different assumptions, risks recognised too late, second- and third-order effects missed entirely, and major commercial decisions made without a common picture of what is actually happening.

Often the burden falls on a handful of people inside the organisation trying to make sense of it all. We hear versions of this constantly. Leaders tell us they cannot keep up with events, struggle to work out what matters, want their teams working off the same picture, and need something credible they can circulate internally without feeling like they are forwarding random articles from the internet.

That is why we are launching GD Corporate Membership.

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GD Corporate Membership

The model is deliberately simple.

GD Corporate Membership gives your organisation ten full-access memberships to Geopolitical Dispatch. Once subscribed, we will ask for ten email addresses and immediately onboard your team.

GD Corporate Membership includes:

• The Daily Dispatch, our concise daily briefing on the five geopolitical developments most likely to affect business, markets and corporate strategy decisions

• Week Signals, our Saturday thematic essay helping readers step back from the noise, understand the broader direction of travel and identify five things to watch in the week ahead

• Invitations to our Monthly Private Roundtables, where we brief members on the most consequential developments of the month, followed by interactive discussion and Q&A

• Quarterly Geopolitical Outlook briefings for boards and executives, using structured scenario analysis to examine possible futures, business implications, industry impacts and strategic choices

• Internal distribution rights, allowing organisations to circulate relevant analysis internally where it supports executive discussions, board papers, strategy sessions or internal briefings

• Priority access to our advisory services, including executive workshops, scenario planning, geopolitical exposure mapping, crisis simulations and geopolitical strategy development

In short, GD Corporate Members receive a cadence of reporting, access and advice designed for the reality of modern leadership teams.

The Daily Dispatch can be read in less than ten minutes. Week Signals helps organisations understand the bigger picture. The monthly and quarterly sessions allow teams to interrogate assumptions, pressure-test scenarios and discuss developments interactively. And advisory access provides a deeper layer of support when required, without the commitment of a retainer.

The baseline GD Corporate Membership costs $1,900 per year. That is deliberately affordable and below procurement thresholds in most organisations. It is designed to cover boards, executive benches, strategy teams and risk functions without becoming a procurement exercise.

It is also a practical way for Geopolitical Dispatch readers to bring a genuinely useful capability into their organisation: something that helps colleagues stay informed, improves leadership discussions and gives teams access to geopolitical analysis written by former diplomats and trusted by some of the world’s largest organisations.

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A shared baseline

You may know that we modelled the Daily Dispatch on the way intelligence agencies brief leaders: the world on a page; strategic, concise, digestible and written for decision-makers.

Products like the President’s Daily Brief or the Prime Minister’s Morning Brief do not go only to the President or Prime Minister. They go to ministers and senior officials across government because the need to know is broader than leadership alone.

GD Corporate Membership is designed on the same premise.

You, as an individual reader, may well need to know what is happening in geopolitics. But in all likelihood, your leadership team would also benefit. So too would your colleagues in legal, supply chain, operations, government affairs and other parts of the organisation increasingly affected by geopolitical developments. And having all these teams reading off the same page builds not just individual awareness, but broader organisational capability.

If you would like to help your organisation deal more effectively with one of the defining management challenges of the decade, you can do so by taking out a GD Corporate Membership on behalf of the firm.

Simply hit “subscribe” and select GD Corporate Membership. Once subscribed, we will contact you for the email addresses of the colleagues you would like onboarded and suggest a short introductory call so we can better understand your organisation and serve you if you ever need to go deeper.

Alternatively, if you would like to discuss whether GD Corporate Membership is right for your organisation, if you need more than ten access points, or if you would like to understand how our advisory services may help, please reply to this email and we would be very happy to run you through it.

Best wishes,

Damien