The Case for a CGO

Do companies need a Chief Geopolitics Officer? (A ‘CGO’ to those already on side.) It’s a question we discussed in the recent PARC report Is Your Organisation Built to Adapt and Survive? We noted the recent emergence of such roles, which is not surprising given the rapidly increasing risks from political developments in recent years.

Politics is having more of an impact on business than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In the Financial Times, Gillian Tett reports from a conference on geoeconomics, a relatively recent term which describes the deployment of financial and economic measures by governments for political ends. Geoeconomics isn’t simply a return to the regulation of the past, it is the subordination of public and private finance to the achievement of geopolitical and military objectives. President Trump’s tariffs are a case in point. 

As she points out, this is an unfamiliar challenge to most business executives:
“In the 20^th century free-market intellectual framework – which is the one in which most western professionals built their careers – it was generally assumed that rational economic self interest ruled the roost, not grubby politics. Politics seemed to be derivative of economics – not the other way around.”

“No longer. The trade war unleashed by US President Donald Trump has shocked many investors, since it seems so irrational by the standards of neoliberal economics. But ‘rational’ or not, it reflects a shift to a world where economics has taken second place to political games, not just in America, but many other places too.”

For the advanced economies, this is a new development (albeit one that might have been more familiar to our ancestors). The fall of the Communist bloc ushered in a period in which pro-business policy became the norm. State intervention went out of fashion and the Washington Consensus saw de-regulation and falling taxes and tariffs across the world. On the whole, governments stayed out of business.

It has been increasingly clear since the middle of the last decade that this benign period is drawing to a close and that politics will, once more, encroach on business decisions. In 2016, the business world was blindsided by Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism. Anti-corporate rhetoric was already building on the populist right as well as the left. Boris Johnson’s ‘f*ck business’ outburst, from what was once thought of as ‘the party of business’, signalled the direction of travel.

This year’s World Economic Forum rated ‘geoeconomic confrontation’ as Number 3 on its list of business risks, just behind extreme weather events and state-based armed conflicts. A look back at the same report from 15 years ago shows almost all the anticipated risks coming from the markets. The assumption then was that ‘disruption’ would be caused by corporate ‘disruptors’. As it turned out, the ‘disruptors’ were protest movements and populist politicians.

In recognition of these trends, PARC has been running annual geopolitical updates for our network for several years. We published a dedicated Geopolitics report in 2018 and our reports on the Future Fit Workforce in 2021, the Future Organisation in 2025 and our annual Reward Directors’ briefings have discussed geopolitical developments in some depth.

As Jon Huntsman, Vice Chair of Mastercard remarked in an interview at the 2025 Davos meeting:
“I think it’s safe to say we’re living in the most economically disruptive moment since World War II and I don’t think we stop enough as boards to really process that. Typically, in the past, we’ve had one annual dinner where we bring in a speaker focused on geopolitics. We have a nice event, a nice roundtable discussion, we close the book and we then go our separate ways. Those days are gone.”

The ’one annual dinner’ approach to managing geopolitical risk won’t cut it any more. While not every company’s budget will run to recruiting a Chief Geopolitics Officer, or experts on the speaker circuit, all businesses will have to get better at understanding and anticipating the impact of politics. As Gillian Tett remarks:
“Don’t expect the intellectual pendulum to swing back soon – even if the US cuts a few trade deals, as Dan Ivascyn of Pimco notes, Trump’s love of tariffs runs deep. For better or worse, we all need to learn to navigate geoeconomics. We cannot just wish it away.”

After three decades during which the political environment was relatively benign for businesses, politics is back with a bang. PARC will continue to provide geopolitical analysis in reports and via speaker events, as we have been doing since the end of the last decade. We see it as a critical area of knowledge and understanding for those working in performance and reward.

Visit www.parcentre.com to see how you can get involved with our briefings and speaker events.