Geopolitics

Why organisations work with Richard Haass His “nonpolarity” framework – first published in Foreign Affairs and developed in A World in Disarray – gives leadership teams a structural vocabulary for geopolitical risk that goes beyond the U.S.-China binary and accounts for the dozens of state and non-state actors now shaping outcomes. He has not only analysed diplomatic crises – he has chaired them. His role as chair of the 2013 Northern Ireland multiparty negotiations, which provided the foundation for the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, gives him practitioner credibility that no purely academic or analytical peer can replicate. Twenty years at the head of the Council on Foreign Relations means organisations gain access to the framework that has shaped U.S. policy thinking across four administrations – not a commentary on that framework, but the source of it. He served inside U.S. foreign policy across four presidencies and both parties – at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House – and can translate the actual mechanics of how foreign policy decisions are made into the strategic implications for non-government actors operating across borders. His New York Times bestseller The Bill of Obligations demonstrates a capacity rare among foreign policy figures: the ability to make complex geopolitical argument legible and actionable for non-specialist audiences, including boards with no background in international relations. Biography highlights President of the Council on Foreign Relations (2003–2023); now President Emeritus – twenty years leading the United States’ most influential foreign policy institution Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State; principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell Senate-confirmed Ambassador; U.S. Special Envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process; U.S. Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan Chaired the 2013 Northern Ireland multiparty negotiations, which formed the foundation for the 2014 Stormont House Agreement Presidential Citizens Medal; State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award; Tipperary International Peace Award; diplomatic decorations from South Korea and Japan Rhodes Scholar; DPhil, Oxford University; formerly on faculty at Harvard Kennedy School of Government Author or editor of sixteen books, including A World in Disarray, the New York Times bestseller The Bill of Obligations, and the originating Foreign Affairs article “The Age of Nonpolarity” Senior Counselor, Centerview Partners; Distinguished University Scholar, NYU School of Professional Studies Biography The post-war international order – the system of alliances, institutions, and rules that governed trade, security, and diplomacy for seven decades – is no longer doing what it was designed to do. For boards operating across borders, that is not an abstract observation. It changes what capital commitments are credible, which supply chains are secure, and which alliances will hold under pressure. Richard Haass led the Council on Foreign Relations for twenty years, shaping U.S. foreign policy debate across the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Before that, he was Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. His government service spans four presidencies and both parties – beginning at the Pentagon under Carter, continuing at the State Department under Reagan, and reaching the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, where he received the Presidential Citizens Medal for his contributions during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. His intellectual contribution is specific. In his Foreign Affairs article “The Age of Nonpolarity” and the book A World in Disarray, he argues that the current era is neither unipolar nor multipolar – it is nonpolar. Power is distributed across dozens of state and non-state actors, alliances are conditional rather than fixed, and the mechanisms that once imposed order are no longer sufficient. For organisations that have built strategy on the assumption of a rules-based international system, that argument has direct consequences for how risk is modelled and where long-term commitments are made. His experience is not only analytical. In 2013, he chaired the multiparty negotiations in Northern Ireland that formed the foundation for the 2014 Stormont House Agreement – making him one of the few people in the world who has both theorised about diplomatic complexity and navigated it at the table. His most recent book, The Bill of Obligations, a New York Times bestseller, extends the argument into democratic governance: what the erosion of civic responsibility means for the political stability on which international order ultimately depends. Key speaking topics Nonpolarity and the fracture of the post-war international order U.S. foreign policy and geopolitical risk Diplomacy, conflict resolution, and negotiation Transatlantic relations and the future of alliances Russia-Ukraine and the reshaping of European security Middle East dynamics and regional instability American democracy, civic obligation, and domestic political risk Geopolitical implications for global business and investment Ideal for Boards and C-suite teams with material exposure to geopolitical risk Financial services, asset management, and investment leadership requiring structured country and political risk assessment Global corporations navigating multi-market operations, trade exposure, or supply chain complexity Government affairs, public policy, and strategic foresight leadership Audience outcomes A structural framework – “nonpolarity” – for understanding why the old geopolitical playbook is no longer reliable, and what the distributed power landscape actually looks like Clarity on the strategic implications of specific flashpoints – Russia-Ukraine, U.S.-China competition, Middle East instability – beyond event-by-event commentary Understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made, where it is likely to go, and what that means for organisations operating across borders A clearer picture of how domestic political instability in democratic societies feeds into international risk and affects the conditions under which institutions and agreements hold Frameworks for scenario planning in a nonpolar environment, where alliances and trade rules are situational rather than fixed

Why organisations work with Ricardo Hausmann He built the frameworks. Economic Complexity and Growth Diagnostics, now used by the IMF, the World Bank, and governments from South Africa to Sri Lanka, are his work. Audiences hear them from the person who originated them. Fifty country engagements deep. The Harvard Growth Lab has run more than 50 research initiatives across nearly 30 countries since 2006, under his direction. He brings what those projects revealed about why standard reform packages fail and where productive capability actually compounds. He has held the brief. Former Minister of Planning of Venezuela and the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he founded the Research Department. He speaks to ministers, central bank governors, and global CFOs as someone who has been on their side of the table. Powershoring is his framing. The argument that energy-intensive production will migrate to countries with abundant green electricity, and that this rewires comparative advantage, originated in his Growth Lab work. Boards working out where to put the next decarbonised plant get the underlying logic from him. The vocabulary traces back to him. Original Sin, Dark Matter, Self-Discovery, and Powershoring are his coinages, now standard in IMF and central bank discourse on sovereign risk and the energy transition. Biography highlights Founder and Director of Harvard’s Growth Lab; Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. Originator with César Hidalgo of the Economic Complexity methodology, published as The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity (MIT Press, 2014). Originator with Dani Rodrik and Andrés Velasco of the Growth Diagnostics framework, adopted by the World Bank as a long-running executive education course. First Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994-2000), where he founded the Research Department. Former Minister of Planning of Venezuela; former Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee. Monthly columnist for Project Syndicate; research cited more than 60,000 times and covered by The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Biography Most standard development indicators fail to predict which economies will actually grow. They measure outputs and surface conditions, not the underlying productive capabilities that generate them. That gap is what Economic Complexity, the framework Ricardo Hausmann built with César Hidalgo at Harvard’s Growth Lab, set out to close. Hausmann founded the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School in 2006. It has since run more than 50 country engagements across nearly 30 countries, identifying the binding constraints on growth and the industries that existing capabilities make possible. The Growth Diagnostics methodology, developed with Dani Rodrik and Andrés Velasco, is now taught at the World Bank and used by governments worldwide. Before Harvard he was on the other side of the brief. He served as Minister of Planning of Venezuela in the early 1990s, then became the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he founded the Research Department. He has seen which policy frameworks survive contact with fiscal and political reality, and which collapse on first contact. His more recent work has moved into the geography of decarbonisation. Powershoring, a concept developed in the Growth Lab, argues that energy-intensive production will migrate to countries with abundant green electricity, rewiring global supply chains in the process. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate; the Growth Lab’s recent client roster runs from Bolivia and the UAE to Wyoming and Western Australia. Key speaking topics Economic complexity and country diversification Growth diagnostics Powershoring and the energy transition Sovereign risk, original sin, and dark matter Industrial policy in a decarbonising economy Latin American political economy Global supply chain reconfiguration Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting country exposure and supply chain strategy. CFOs and treasurers managing sovereign and currency risk in emerging markets. Heads of corporate strategy planning industrial investment under the energy transition. Multilateral institutions, finance ministries, and central bank leadership. Audience outcomes A working diagnostic for why some economies grow and others stall, built on the Economic Complexity framework. A sharper read on where productive capability is compounding and where it is decaying, with implications for supply chain placement and country exposure. The case for powershoring and the structural logic that will move energy-intensive production toward countries with abundant green electricity. What 50+ Growth Lab country engagements have revealed about why standard reform packages fail. The vocabulary that finance ministries and central banks now use to discuss sovereign risk: original sin, dark matter, self-discovery.

Why organisations work with Raghuram Rajan The Fault Lines framework – winner of the 2010 FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year – gives organisations a specific, named diagnostic for distinguishing structural economic imbalance from cyclical volatility. That is a different tool from scenario planning or macroeconomic outlook, and more useful at board level. He is the only prominent economist to have publicly and formally predicted the 2008 financial crisis in advance – at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in 2005 – and been dismissed at the time. That track record is a credential no other economics speaker holds. He governed a major central bank through a period of acute currency stress and capital flight, giving senior audiences access to decision-making insight from inside a monetary authority under pressure – not retrospective academic analysis of one. His Third Pillar argument – that markets and states, operating without healthy communities, produce the political backlash that now defines operating risk for global organisations – provides a structural explanation for the instability that most business risk frameworks treat as noise. As Chairman of the Group of Thirty, the senior body that shapes global monetary and financial policy thinking, his analysis is current and policy-facing, not retrospective. Biography highlights Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (2013–2016); Vice-Chairman, Board of the Bank for International Settlements (2015–2016) Chief Economist and Director of Research, International Monetary Fund (2003–2006) Presented research at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in 2005 warning of structural financial risk – widely recognised as a prescient forecast of the 2008 global financial crisis Author of Fault Lines (FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, 2010) and The Third Pillar (shortlisted, FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, 2019); co-author of Breaking the Mould (Princeton University Press, 2024) Chairman, Group of Thirty; Chairman, Per Jacobsson Foundation; Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fischer Black Prize, American Finance Association (inaugural, 2003); Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics (2013); Euromoney Central Banker of the Year (2014); Banker Magazine Central Banker of the Year (2016) Regular contributor to Project Syndicate on global economic and monetary policy Biography Financial crises don’t arrive without signals – they arrive without being believed. In 2005, at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium, Rajan presented research identifying structural risks in the financial system that could, if unaddressed, precipitate a major crisis. The then-US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers dismissed the analysis publicly. Three years later, the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. That episode anchors Rajan’s central argument, developed in Fault Lines – the 2010 FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year – that global financial crises are rooted in structural political and economic imbalances, not isolated market failures. He applied this framework at the level of actual policy: as Chief Economist at the IMF from 2003 to 2006, shaping global economic analysis across a period of significant financial stress; and as the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, managing monetary policy through currency pressure and capital outflows that tested emerging market resilience. His 2019 book The Third Pillar, shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, extends the argument into political economy. The conventional debate between markets and the state, Rajan contends, ignores the community as a third and equally necessary foundation of economic stability. When that pillar erodes – as globalisation concentrates gains and disperses costs – the political backlash follows. That dynamic now constitutes a primary operating risk for organisations across every sector. As Chairman of the Group of Thirty, a regular contributor to Project Syndicate, and co-author of Breaking the Mould (Princeton University Press, 2024) – which proposes a new economic development path for India as the traditional manufacturing-led growth model becomes less viable – Rajan continues to work at the intersection of economic analysis and practical policy, where the consequences of getting the diagnosis wrong are most clearly visible. Key speaking topics Global macroeconomics and financial stability Structural risk and the conditions that precede financial crises Central banking and monetary policy Emerging markets and economic development Political economy: globalisation, populism, and community India’s economic trajectory and structural reform ESG, corporate disclosure, and responsible capitalism Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams at multinational organisations assessing macroeconomic and geopolitical risk Senior leadership in financial services – banking, asset management, insurance, and central banking institutions Chief strategy officers and chief risk officers stress-testing global market assumptions Government bodies, policy forums, and international economic organisations Audience outcomes A specific framework for reading structural fault lines in the global economy, distinct from standard macroeconomic forecasting Grounded understanding of how central banks weigh political pressure against policy mandates – from someone who managed that tension in office A clearer account of why globalisation generates political backlash, and what that means for organisations operating across different political environments Context for emerging market risk – particularly India – built on policy experience rather than external analysis A more rigorous basis for stress-testing the macroeconomic assumptions embedded in corporate strategy and investment decisions

Why organisations work with Rageh Omaar A reporting record built on the ground in Baghdad, Kabul, Darfur and across the wider Middle East and Africa, not a studio commentator with borrowed authority A Peabody for BBC dispatches from Darfur and a BAFTA for the BBC’s Afghanistan coverage, two of the most demanding awards in international news A daily editorial seat at ITV News that keeps his read on conflict, sanctions and the international order current rather than retrospective A track record chairing senior-stakes events for Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, The Economist and DNV in Oslo, where the brief is to keep a difficult conversation moving without flattening it Biography highlights International Affairs Editor, ITV News, and presenter on ITV News at Ten and the current affairs strand On Assignment Former senior BBC foreign correspondent, the lead face of BBC News during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the only western television journalist inside Taliban-held Kabul as it fell in 2001 Peabody Award winner for BBC reporting from Darfur, BAFTA winner for the BBC’s coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan Presenter of Witness and The Rageh Omaar Report on Al Jazeera English between 2006 and 2010 Author of Revolution Day: The Real Story of the Battle for Iraq (Penguin) and Only Half of Me: Being a Muslim in Britain (Viking) Authored long-form documentary series for the BBC including The Life of Muhammad (BBC Two) and The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors (BBC Two) Biography Baghdad in March 2003 was the first conflict of the modern news cycle, fought as much through television as through the air. Rageh Omaar led the BBC’s coverage from inside the city as the bombing began, and his nightly dispatches became, for British and international audiences, the picture of how the war was unfolding. The reporting won him an international audience and a permanent association with the most difficult kind of foreign coverage, journalism done from the place the story is happening. The career sits on a longer record. Omaar was the only western television journalist inside Taliban-held Kabul as it fell in 2001, work that earned the BBC a BAFTA. His subsequent reporting from Darfur for the BBC was recognised with a Peabody, the most stringent broadcast journalism prize awarded in the United States. After a period at Al Jazeera English presenting Witness and The Rageh Omaar Report, he moved to ITV News in 2013 and was promoted to International Affairs Editor a year later. Beyond breaking news, his work has consistently turned to the long story of the Islamic world and its relationship with Europe. Documentary series including The Life of Muhammad and The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors, both for BBC Two, sit alongside his books Revolution Day and Only Half of Me, the second a study of British Muslim identity drawn partly from his own Somali-British background. That body of work is what differentiates him from a general-purpose news anchor when corporate audiences want a serious on-stage conversation about the Middle East, Africa or the wider rules-based order. On the platform, he is engaged most often as moderator, chair and interviewer for senior audiences at firms including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, The Economist and DNV. The brief in those rooms is to handle a sensitive subject in front of a room that knows the surface of it, and to draw out a guest or a panel without letting the conversation drift. That is the craft he brings, supported by reporting credentials that let him hold the room when the topic is geopolitics rather than industry talk. Key speaking topics Geopolitics and international affairs The Middle East and the rules-based order Africa, conflict and economic development Foreign reporting and the modern news cycle Islam, identity and the West Conference moderation, panel chairing and on-stage interviewing Ideal for Boards and executive committees commissioning a serious on-stage conversation on geopolitical risk, the Middle East or Africa Annual conferences and global leadership offsites that need a credible chair for the international-affairs session Policy, energy and financial-services events where the moderator must hold authority on conflict, sanctions and political risk Corporate award ceremonies and after-dinner formats that require a recognisable broadcaster with substance behind the name Audience outcomes A grounded read on the international story currently shaping board-level decisions, drawn from a working editor’s seat rather than archive material A clearer sense of how the Middle East and Africa look from inside the reporting, beyond the cable news framing An on-stage conversation or panel that holds together at the level senior audiences expect, with difficult questions asked and not avoided A frame for thinking about Islam, identity and the West that comes from sustained reporting and writing, not commentary

Why organisations work with Peter Frankopan His central argument in The Silk Roads – that Eurasian trade routes, not Western nation-states, were the real axis of wealth and power for most of human history – gives leaders a structurally different mental map for reading where global economic gravity is moving. This is not commentary; it is a published, peer-reviewed thesis that has sold over two million copies across forty languages. The Earth Transformed makes a specific and uncomfortable argument for boards: that climate and the natural environment are not a policy consideration layered onto geopolitics, but the primary driver of the rise and fall of economies and empires. It resets how serious organisations should be thinking about long-term risk, not just ESG compliance. His advisory work for the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors and with UNIDO on Belt and Road infrastructure means his analysis of global connectivity is grounded in live geopolitical and economic reality – not theoretical. Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019, his work is positioned at the intersection of serious scholarship and applied strategic relevance – carrying weight with both policymakers and corporate boards. His geographic scope is genuinely unusual: he works across the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Iran, Central Asia, and China as an integrated system – making him the rare authority on Eurasian dynamics as a whole rather than a single-region specialist. Biography highlights Professor of Global History, Oxford University; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director, Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research; Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies; Bye-Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge Author of The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury) – No.1 Sunday Times bestseller, Sunday Times Book of the Decade 2010–19, translated into more than 40 languages, 2m+ copies sold Author of The Earth Transformed (Bloomsbury) – The Times History Book of the Year; Financial Times and Guardian/Observer Book of the Year Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers (2019); recipient of the Calliope Prize, German Emigration Center, and the Carical Foundation Human Sciences Prize Senior Advisor to the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors; involved with UNIDO’s Bridge for Cities Programme on Belt and Road and sustainable urban development Regular contributor to the Financial Times, Guardian, and New York Times; co-host of the Legacy podcast (Goalhanger/Wondery) with Afua Hirsch Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Royal Historical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, and Royal Geographical Society Biography The Silk Roads were not a romantic footnote to European history. They were the main event. That is the argument Peter Frankopan – Professor of Global History at Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research – has spent two decades building: that the trade routes running through Central Asia, Persia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean were the real axis of wealth, power, and exchange for most of recorded history, and that the West’s period of dominance was the exception, not the rule. His book The Silk Roads made that case to a global readership – No.1 in the Sunday Times, named Book of the Decade, translated into more than forty languages. The New Silk Roads brought the argument into the present, reading China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the re-emergence of Central Asian states, and the reconfiguration of energy markets not as emerging-market news but as the return of structural patterns. His most recent work, The Earth Transformed – The Times History Book of the Year 2023 – extends the argument further still: climate and the natural environment, he argues, are not a policy layer on top of geopolitics but the defining force in the rise and fall of civilisations and economies. Frankopan does not only write about geopolitics. He advises on it. He has served as Senior Advisor to the World Bank on South Asian transport corridors and worked with UNIDO on the future of sustainable cities along Belt and Road. Named one of Prospect Magazine’s World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019, he contributes to the Financial Times, Guardian, and New York Times, and advises governments, multilateral institutions, and multinational organisations on geopolitical risk. For boards navigating what is, by any historical measure, a genuine structural shift in where power, trade, and risk are concentrated, Frankopan offers something rarer than expertise: a framework for distinguishing what is structurally new from what has happened before, and knowing which is which. Key speaking topics Global power shifts and the rebalancing between East and West The Silk Roads: Eurasian trade, connectivity, and long-term economic patterns China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the new geography of global commerce Geopolitical risk: Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Iran Climate and environment as long-term drivers of economic and geopolitical change The limits of Western strategic assumptions and the rules-based order BRICS, the global majority, and the emergence of new economic frameworks Ideal for Board members and C-suite teams assessing geopolitical risk in international trade, investment, or expansion Financial services, investment, and sovereign wealth fund audiences analysing long-term global economic trends Government, policy, and public sector leaders navigating strategic realignment between West and East International affairs forums and CEO-level summits seeking rigorous historical context for decisions with long time horizons Audience outcomes A reframed understanding of where global economic and political gravity is moving – grounded in historical evidence rather than current news cycles Clearer thinking about China, Central Asia, and the Middle East as structural actors, not simply emerging markets or risk zones to monitor A historical framework for treating climate and environmental factors as long-term geopolitical and economic forces rather than compliance issues Greater ability to distinguish structural shifts in the global order from cyclical volatility when making decisions that extend beyond the short term Specific historical precedents and patterns that challenge Western-centric assumptions embedded in most strategic planning frameworks

Why organisations work with Pascal Lamy He spent eight years running the WTO and five years as the EU’s Trade Commissioner. Few people alive have personally negotiated as much of the architecture that boards now watch breaking down. He works at the level of operating substance, not commentary. Doha, EU enlargement trade chapters, the China accession follow-through, the transatlantic disputes: he was in the room. He frames geoeconomics and geopolitics as a single system, an argument set out with Nicole Gnesotto in Strange New World, which gives leaders a working language for decisions they used to treat as separate. He is a credible bridge into European institutional thinking. Chef de cabinet to Jacques Delors for nine years, now President of the Paris Peace Forum and President emeritus of the Jacques Delors Institute. Biography highlights Director-General of the World Trade Organization, 2005 to 2013, re-elected unanimously for a second term. European Commissioner for Trade, 1999 to 2004, under Commission President Romano Prodi. Chef de cabinet to Jacques Delors at the European Commission, 1985 to 1994. CEO of Credit Lyonnais through its restructuring and privatisation, 1994 to 1999. Author of The Geneva Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and co-author of Strange New World: Geoeconomics vs Geopolitics (Odile Jacob, 2020). President of the Paris Peace Forum; CEPR Distinguished Fellow; affiliate professor at HEC Paris and CEIBS Shanghai. Biography The system of rules that governed cross-border trade for three decades is no longer the system companies are operating in. Tariffs, export controls, sanctions regimes and industrial subsidies have become first-order strategic variables, and the institutions designed to arbitrate them have lost most of their authority. Pascal Lamy spent two decades inside that machinery and is one of the few public figures who can describe, from the inside, what is breaking and what is taking its place. As Director-General of the World Trade Organization from 2005 to 2013, re-elected unanimously for a second term, he led the institution through the Doha Round and through China’s full integration into the global trading system. Before that, as European Commissioner for Trade from 1999 to 2004, he handled the EU’s most consequential trade files of the period, including its position on WTO accession negotiations and transatlantic disputes. His earlier career sits at the heart of the European project. For nine years he was chef de cabinet to Jacques Delors at the European Commission, working on the single market, the run-up to monetary union and successive enlargement. He then ran Credit Lyonnais through its restructuring and privatisation, a reminder that his read on policy is paired with operating experience inside a balance sheet under pressure. He now writes and convenes from a small set of platforms: President of the Paris Peace Forum, President emeritus of the Jacques Delors Institute, CEPR Distinguished Fellow, affiliate professor at HEC Paris and CEIBS Shanghai. With Nicole Gnesotto he co-authored Strange New World, the argument that geoeconomics and geopolitics now have to be read as one system. For boards trying to set capital allocation under that framing, he is among the most credible voices available. Key speaking topics Global trade and the future of the WTO Geoeconomics and geopolitics EU-US-China relations European integration and the EU policy agenda Sanctions, export controls and industrial policy Globalisation and supply chain restructuring Multilateral governance under strain Ideal for Boards and executive committees of multinationals with material exposure to US, EU and China trade policy CSOs, heads of public affairs and chief economists setting macro and political risk frameworks Investor and asset manager forums focused on capital allocation under geopolitical stress Senior policy and government affairs leaders working on EU institutional questions Audience outcomes A working map of how the trade and geoeconomics system is actually being rewired, from someone who helped write the previous version A grounded read on the EU-US-China triangle that goes beyond headline risk Sharper questions for the board on sanctions exposure, supply chain restructuring and industrial policy alignment A vocabulary for treating geoeconomics and geopolitics as one decision frame, not two

Why organisations work with Paolo Surico He has shown, using household and firm micro-data, that most of the consumption response to interest rates comes from mortgaged households, which is the single most useful framing for any business modelling consumer demand under a rate cycle. His American Economic Review paper on the long-run effects of government spending was cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement, which is rare evidence that academic work has moved actual fiscal policy. His advisory portfolio with the Bank of England, European Central Bank, European Commission, and Financial Conduct Authority means he reads central bank communications from the inside, not as a commentator. His ESRC GBP 1 million grant and ERC Starting Grant put him in the top tier of European macroeconomists by independent funder validation. He translates technical macro into language a non-economist board can use, which is the reason financial services and professional services firms book him repeatedly. Biography highlights Professor of Economics, London Business School Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research; Research Associate, LSE Centre for Macroeconomics Co-author, “The Long-Run Effects of Government Spending,” American Economic Review (2025), cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement Awarded a GBP 1 million ESRC grant for “Long-Run Consequences of Business-Cycle Fluctuations”; recipient of an ERC Starting Grant Former Adviser to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee; consultant to the European Central Bank, European Commission, and Financial Conduct Authority Regular contributor and commentator in the Financial Times, The Economist, Il Sole 24 Ore, and Corriere della Sera Biography Most macroeconomic commentary stops at the aggregate. Surico’s work begins where it usually ends: with the household and the firm. Using micro-data from the US and UK, he has shown that mortgaged households drive most of the consumption response to interest rate changes, while outright owners barely move at all. That finding has reframed how central banks think about transmission, and it gives commercial leaders something more useful than a forecast. His 2025 American Economic Review paper with Juan Antolin-Diaz, “The Long-Run Effects of Government Spending,” used 125 years of US data to show that military and public R&D spending produce large, persistent growth effects through their composition, not their size. The paper was cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement, which is an unusually direct line between academic research and fiscal policy. The credentials are substantial. Fellow of CEPR, Research Associate at the LSE Centre for Macroeconomics, former Adviser to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, current consultant to the European Central Bank and European Commission. A GBP 1 million ESRC grant and an ERC Starting Grant sit behind the academic record. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, and the major Italian financial press. What sets him apart for boardroom audiences is the bridge he builds between empirical macro and decisions a leadership team has to make this quarter. When he talks about household debt, demographic change, or the redistributive effects of monetary policy, the argument lands in concrete terms that a CFO, a head of strategy, or a wealth-management chief can act on. Key speaking topics Monetary policy transmission and household debt Public debt sustainability and fiscal outlook Government spending, innovation, and long-run growth Inequality and the macroeconomy Housing, credit, and financial markets Demographic change and macroeconomic policy Ideal for CFO, treasury, and finance leadership teams in financial services, asset management, and insurance Boards and executive committees stress-testing strategy against rate, fiscal, and policy scenarios Wealth and private banking client events where senior clients want substantive macro analysis Strategy and economic-policy functions in industrials, real estate, and consumer-facing sectors Audience outcomes A clearer view of how rate decisions actually move through mortgaged households, renters, and balance sheets, rather than aggregate models A framework for reading central bank communications from the inside of the policy process Specific implications of public debt and government spending trajectories for medium-term growth and capital allocation A grounded read on inequality as a macroeconomic amplifier, not a social commentary point

Why organisations work with Paolo Scaroni He has run two of Europe’s largest energy companies, Enel from 2002 to 2005 and Eni from 2005 to 2014, through privatisation, restructuring and the early phase of the energy transition. He brings a working view of natural gas as a transition fuel from inside the boardrooms that bought, sold and shipped it, not from the outside as an analyst. His current chairmanship of Enel and nine years as Deputy Chairman of Rothschild & Co give him an unusually current read on capital allocation, M&A and governance in the European energy sector. He has sat on the boards of Veolia, BAE Systems, ABN AMRO, Alstom, Assicurazioni Generali and the London Stock Exchange, which gives him cross-sector reference points few energy speakers can offer. Discussions are pragmatic rather than ideological, useful for boards trying to reconcile net zero commitments with capital, supply and political reality. Biography highlights CEO of Enel from May 2002 to May 2005 and CEO of Eni from 2005 to 2014. Chairman of Enel since May 2023; Chairman of A.C. Milan since July 2018. Deputy Chairman of Rothschild & Co Group from May 2014 to May 2023. CEO of Pilkington plc in London from 1997 to 2002, leading the turnaround of one of the world’s largest flat glass manufacturers; earlier CEO of Techint from 1985 to 1996. Past non-executive director at Veolia Environment, BAE Systems, ABN AMRO, Alstom and Assicurazioni Generali; former Vice Chairman of the London Stock Exchange. Cavaliere del Lavoro (2004) and member of the Légion d’honneur (2007); Bocconi graduate and Columbia Business School MBA. Biography European energy is being asked to do three things at once: decarbonise, stay secure and remain affordable. Few executives have made those trade-offs at the scale Paolo Scaroni has. As CEO of Enel from 2002 and then of Eni from 2005 to 2014, he ran Italy’s two largest energy companies through privatisation, restructuring and the first wave of the climate agenda. At Enel he abandoned the multi-utility model and pushed the group back into core energy, set up a dedicated wind business, and brought the company into the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. At Eni he tilted the portfolio away from oil toward natural gas, framing gas as a transition fuel, and the group’s net worth rose from EUR 39 billion to EUR 61 billion over his tenure. Eni was added to the Carbon Performance Leadership Index in 2012. After Eni he spent nine years as Deputy Chairman of Rothschild & Co, advising on European deals across the energy and industrial sectors, before being appointed Chairman of Enel in May 2023. He has chaired A.C. Milan since 2018, including through the club’s 2022 Scudetto and the change of ownership to RedBird Capital. Past non-executive seats at Veolia, BAE Systems, ABN AMRO, Alstom, Assicurazioni Generali and the London Stock Exchange give him a working view of governance across regulated industries. His public position on the energy transition is unusually direct: renewables alone will not get Europe to its CO2 targets, energy efficiency and nuclear have to be part of the answer, and gas is the realistic bridge. That argument carries weight because he had to allocate capital against it, not just write about it. Key speaking topics Energy transition and energy security Geopolitical and regulatory risk in energy markets Natural gas, nuclear and the realistic path to net zero Large-scale transformation in legacy industries Board governance and stakeholder management in regulated sectors Capital allocation in capital-intensive industries European industrial competitiveness Ideal for Boards and executive committees in energy, utilities, industrials and infrastructure CFOs, heads of strategy and corporate development weighing transition capex Investor and lender audiences focused on European energy and industrial credit Senior leadership teams reframing decarbonisation strategy against geopolitical risk Audience outcomes A grounded read on where European energy security and the transition timetable actually meet. A sharper view of how natural gas, nuclear and renewables fit together in a credible decarbonisation plan. Boardroom-tested judgement on geopolitical and regulatory risk in capital-intensive industries. A reference frame from someone who has chaired and run companies on both sides of the energy table.

Why organisations work with Pankaj Mishra His Age of Anger thesis ties populist nationalism in the US, Britain, India, Russia and Turkey to the same 19th-century intellectual origins, giving boards a single coherent frame for what most analysts treat as separate national stories. He brings the perspective of the world’s majority, drawn from original archival work across India, China, Iran and Turkey, into rooms where geopolitical analysis is still calibrated to a Western-led order. He works at the level of cause. Most commentary explains what just happened; his books explain why this kind of thing keeps happening across very different countries. Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Weston International Award and a Royal Society of Literature fellowship sit behind two decades of essays in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy and the Guardian. The name carries weight in senior rooms. His 2025 book, The World After Gaza, is one of the most discussed treatments of the moral rupture in the global order since October 7, useful for any leadership team weighing reputational and political risk in a polarised market. Biography highlights Author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012), winner of Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2014, the first non-Western writer to take the prize. Author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire (2020) and The World After Gaza: A History (Penguin Press, 2025). Recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction (2014) and the Weston International Award for career achievement in nonfiction (2024). Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Long-form contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Foreign Policy and Harper’s. Previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Past visiting fellowships at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library and the Department of English at University College London. Biography The populist nationalism remaking democracies from Washington to Delhi to Ankara to Moscow is usually told as four separate stories. The argument running through Pankaj Mishra’s books is that they share a single 18th-century origin. A slow global civil war over the meaning of progress has been underway ever since. In Age of Anger (2017), he traced the rage and resentment of the present to Rousseau’s quarrel with Voltaire and the disappointed promises of European modernity. From the Ruins of Empire (2012), which won Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, ran the same exercise in reverse. It followed the Asian intellectuals (Tagore, Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) who watched their civilisations being subordinated by the West. The intellectual apparatus they built shapes everything today, from Chinese state strategy to political Islam. His latest book, The World After Gaza (Penguin Press, 2025), reads the post-1945 moral order through the present war and the global response to it. It has placed him at the centre of one of the most consequential intellectual debates of the moment. The book builds on the body of nonfiction that won Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the 2024 Weston International Award for career achievement. For senior audiences, the value is not commentary on the news. Mishra works the level beneath it: the long-running shifts in power and legitimacy that determine where capital and credibility actually go. The Weston jury described him as “a writer for and of this difficult and complex world we are creating.” That captures why his analysis is in demand whenever the meaning of the present moment is genuinely in question. Key speaking topics The roots of populism and political anger Geopolitical risk and the post-1945 global order The view from the global majority Nationalism, identity and the politics of resentment India under Modi and the geopolitics of South Asia The intellectual history of modernity Decolonisation and its long aftermath Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting strategy in markets where political risk and the shifting balance between Western and non-Western centres of power materially affect long-horizon decisions Investment committees, sovereign wealth funds and family offices with significant exposure across emerging markets and the wider Global South Senior leadership off-sites where the geopolitical context of capital allocation and major strategic decisions is on the agenda Audiences in financial services, energy, media, foreign policy and academia who buy serious intellectual content over motivational commentary Audience outcomes A unified intellectual frame for the populism and political anger reshaping major democracies. Most coverage offers separate national stories; Mishra shows them as one connected phenomenon. A clearer sense of how the rest of the world reads the same shift in the global order, and what that means for organisations operating across the West and non-West. Historical context for the present moment that goes well beyond the news cycle, with arguments built from original archival research. Sharper questions to take into long-horizon strategic discussions, particularly on political risk and on operating in markets aligned to non-Western centres of power.

Why organisations work with Pankaj Ghemawat He is the originator of the CAGE Distance Framework, the canonical model for evaluating cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic distance between countries, taught in MBA strategy courses worldwide and used inside boards making market entry decisions. He is principal author of the DHL Global Connectedness Index, the most widely cited empirical measure of cross-border flows of trade, capital, information, and people, which gives leadership teams a defensible reading of the global environment rather than headline narrative. His Law of Semiglobalization gives boards a precise corrective to the assumption that the world is either flat or fracturing, and reframes how to size international ambition against domestic baseline. He holds chairs at IESE Business School and NYU Stern, with 25 years of prior Harvard Business School faculty work, including a McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. World 3.0 won the Thinkers50 Book Award for best business book of 2010 to 2011, and The Economist named him among the greatest management thinkers in its 2008 guide. Biography highlights Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School and Global Professor of Management and Strategy at NYU Stern. Director of the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management at NYU Stern. Principal author of the DHL Global Connectedness Index, introduced in 2011. Author of The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications (Cambridge University Press) and World 3.0 (Harvard Business Review Press), winner of the Thinkers50 Book Award. Recipient of the McKinsey Award for best Harvard Business Review article and the Booz Eminent Scholar Award of the Academy of Management’s International Management Division. Named among the greatest management thinkers in The Economist’s 2008 guide and ranked in the Thinkers50. Biography The hardest strategic question in front of most boards is also the one with the weakest data inside the building: how exposed are we to a world that may be fragmenting, and where should we still be investing across borders. Pankaj Ghemawat has spent his career building the empirical apparatus that answers that question. The CAGE Distance Framework, his contribution to global strategy in the 2000s, gave executives a precise way to measure cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic distance between countries. It is now standard material in MBA strategy courses and inside corporate development teams making market entry calls. World 3.0, published by Harvard Business Review Press, won the Thinkers50 Book Award for best business book of 2010 to 2011. His later work, The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2016), formalises two findings drawn from large datasets: international interactions are smaller than domestic ones, and they are dampened by distance along the CAGE dimensions. Boards that internalise both laws stop oscillating between flat-world enthusiasm and deglobalisation panic, and start sizing international ambition against measured reality. He is principal author of the DHL Global Connectedness Index, introduced in 2011 and now the most widely cited empirical measure of trade, capital, information, and people flows across borders. He holds chairs at IESE Business School and NYU Stern, where he directs the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management. Between 1983 and 2008 he was on the full-time faculty at Harvard Business School, where he was made a full professor in 1991, the youngest in the school’s history. Key speaking topics Globalisation and deglobalisation Cross-border strategy and CAGE distance Market entry and emerging markets Geopolitical risk and corporate exposure Supply chain and global value chain restructuring Global Connectedness Index and trade flows International competitive advantage Ideal for Boards and CEOs reviewing international portfolio exposure, China strategy, or sanctions risk Chief Strategy Officers and corporate development teams evaluating market entry or exit Heads of supply chain and operations restructuring after the end of cheap globalisation Senior leadership teams in multinationals setting the next horizon of cross-border investment Audience outcomes A defensible reading of the actual state of globalisation, drawn from the DHL Global Connectedness Index, not headline narrative. The CAGE Distance Framework as a working tool for evaluating country and market decisions. A clear distinction between semiglobalisation and full integration, and what that implies for strategy. Specific implications for boards on China exposure, regional concentration, and supply chain redesign. A sharper internal vocabulary for separating measurable cross-border risk from political mood.

Why organisations work with Oliver Kamm He has lived on both sides of the analyst’s desk. Twenty years at the Bank of England, HSBC Securities and Commerzbank Securities, then sixteen years and counting writing The Times leaders on economics and foreign affairs. He reads the data the way a strategist does and frames it the way an editor does. His weekly Times economics column is a primary reference point for British policy debate, which means audiences are hearing the same analysis Westminster, the City and Whitehall are reading the next morning. Authored Accidence Will Happen, endorsed by Steven Pinker as “a unique and indispensable guide to usage”, a credential that signals the rigour he brings to argument and language as well as numbers. He moves cleanly between keynote, panel moderation and after-dinner formats, which lets a single booking cover macro briefing, on-stage interrogation of a CEO and a sharper closing address. Biography highlights Leader writer and columnist at The Times since 2008, covering economics and international affairs. Twenty-year City career: Bank of England, HSBC Securities (European Equity Strategist), Commerzbank Securities (Head of Strategic Research) and founder of WMG Advisors LLP. Author of Anti-Totalitarianism (Social Affairs Unit, 2005), Accidence Will Happen (W&N, 2015) and Mending the Mind (2021). Regular contributor on Newsnight, The Today Programme, Channel 4 News, The Daily Politics, Radio 5 Live and Sky News. Bylines in The Guardian, Prospect, The New York Times and The Jewish Chronicle. Educated at New College, Oxford and Birkbeck College, University of London. Biography The case for booking a serious economics voice for a senior audience usually comes down to translation. Boards are not short of data. They are short of a credible reader of the data who can take a position without flinching, and explain it in language a non-economist will repeat in a meeting the next day. That is the role Kamm has occupied at The Times since 2008. He writes a twice-weekly economics column and is the paper’s principal leader writer on economics and international affairs, which means his analysis sits inside the daily editorial line of one of the few British newspapers still read across Westminster, the City and Whitehall. Before journalism he spent two decades inside the markets he now writes about. Bank of England, HSBC Securities as European Equity Strategist, Commerzbank Securities as Head of Strategic Research, then WMG Advisors LLP, which he founded in 2004. The City background shapes how he reads policy. Capital flows, currency exposure and the actual mechanics of investment decisions are not abstractions when he speaks about them. He is also a working author outside economics. Accidence Will Happen, his 2015 guide to English usage drawn from his Times “Pedant” column, was praised by Steven Pinker for relying on “scholarship rather than dogma”. Mending the Mind followed in 2021. The range matters: it is the reason he holds a room as moderator or after-dinner speaker as confidently as he does in a macro keynote. Key speaking topics Global economy and macro outlook International politics and policy The British economy and public policy Markets, capital flows and the City Media, journalism and editorial judgement Language, communication and clear writing Ideal for Boards and executive committees taking capital allocation or geographic-exposure decisions under macro and geopolitical uncertainty CFOs, treasurers and risk leads briefing internal audiences on the British and global outlook Conference programme owners needing one person to keynote, moderate the CEO panel and close the dinner Audience outcomes A clear, defensible read of the current macro and geopolitical picture, framed for non-economists A working sense of which signals in financial markets and policy actually matter for the year ahead Sharper questions to ask of internal economics and strategy briefings Confidence in the editorial framing of the company’s own external communication on economics and policy

Why organisations work with Nouriel Roubini His 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, which outlined the specific structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that caused the 2008 financial crisis before they were widely recognised, gives his risk scenarios a credibility that peer analysis rarely carries. The MegaThreats framework, the argument that ten overlapping structural forces, including sovereign debt, geopolitical rivalry, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress, reinforce one another, equips leadership teams to analyse compound risk rather than managing individual threats in isolation. As both an academic and an active strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and Atlas Capital Team, he connects macro-risk analysis to live capital allocation decisions, not retrospective commentary. His public-sector career spans the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, giving him a direct, lived understanding of how policymakers reason under pressure, and where their responses typically fall short. His forecasting runs in both directions. The economist who warned the IMF in 2006 has since argued, against consensus, that a technology-led productivity surge will sustain US growth towards 4% by the end of the decade, a case made in the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Boards get a weighed reading of upside and downside scenarios. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Economics and International Business, NYU Stern School of Business; previously on faculty at Yale University Author of MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them (Little, Brown, 2022) and Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010) 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund accurately identified the structural vulnerabilities that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis Ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” (2009); named among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World (2009); multiple further appearances on Foreign Policy’s annual list Senior Economist for International Affairs, White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–1999); Senior Adviser to the Undersecretary for International Affairs and Director of the Office of Policy Development and Review, U.S. Treasury Department (1999–2000) Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates; Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital; Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager, Atlas Capital Team Monthly columnist for Project Syndicate; profiled by the Financial Times, New York Times Magazine, and Bloomberg; PhD in Economics, Harvard University; BA, Bocconi University Biography Nouriel Roubini’s most consequential professional moment came at a 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, where he outlined the structural conditions (overleveraged housing markets, fragile credit instruments, unsustainable household debt) that would produce the 2008 global financial crisis. The IMF’s own economists were, by contemporaneous accounts, sceptical. Within two years, the scenario had materialised almost exactly as described. That track record is the foundation of his authority. Roubini is a Professor Emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, with a career spanning the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Treasury Department under Timothy Geithner, and advisory roles at the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve. His academic foundation rests on a PhD in Economics from Harvard and more than 70 published papers on sovereign debt, financial crises, and international capital flows. His 2022 book, MegaThreats (Little, Brown), advances a named framework for compound systemic risk. The thesis is precise: ten structural forces, sovereign debt at historic highs, geopolitical fragmentation, demographic pressure, AI-driven labour displacement, and climate stress among them, are not independent variables but mutually reinforcing ones. For organisations still using single-factor risk frameworks, the argument is a direct challenge to how they model exposure. Alongside his academic and research work, Roubini serves as Senior Economic Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and as Chief Economist and Portfolio Manager at Atlas Capital Team, roles that keep his analysis connected to live capital allocation decisions. The crisis-prediction reputation understates the range of his judgment: he has recently argued in the Financial Times that a technology-led productivity boom will sustain US exceptionalism despite tariffs and fiscal strain. He is a monthly contributor to Project Syndicate and has been ranked #4 on Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” Key speaking topics Global macroeconomic outlook and downside risk scenarios Sovereign debt, fiscal dominance, and currency risk Geopolitical fragmentation and its economic consequences US-China strategic rivalry and the restructuring of global trade Financial crises: structural causes, policy responses, and systemic aftermath Inflation, monetary policy, and central bank independence AI, automation, and structural shifts in labour markets Compound systemic risk: the MegaThreats framework Ideal for Boards and executive leadership teams stress-testing strategy against macro-economic disruption CFOs, CROs, and treasury functions making capital allocation and risk management decisions in volatile conditions Investment and financial services leadership, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, requiring rigorous macro-risk briefings Government, public policy, and multilateral forums addressing fiscal strategy, monetary policy, and geopolitical-economic interdependence Audience outcomes A structured understanding of how macro forces, debt, geopolitics, monetary policy, interact and compound rather than operating in isolation Specific frameworks, drawn from the MegaThreats thesis, for anticipating systemic stress before it becomes visible in headline economic indicators Clarity on the geopolitical dynamics, particularly US-China rivalry, fiscal dominance risk, and the conditions for de-dollarisation, most likely to affect long-range strategic planning A more calibrated reading of central bank and government policy responses, and the structural conditions under which those responses typically fail or arrive too late Practical language and conceptual tools for articulating compound systemic risk to boards, investors, and regulators, beyond standard scenario planning conventions