‘It’s a myth that things were ever predictable and stable’
‘It’s a myth that things were ever predictable and stable’
Tina Fordham, the first geopolitical analyst on Wall Street, has advised Tony Blair and the UN on strategy, created Eurasia Group’s financial markets research business and is host of the London Stock Exchange’s Navigator series. Here she talks growth, purpose and why all CAs need to develop their political quotient
Tina Fordham, the first geopolitical analyst on Wall Street, has advised Tony Blair and the UN on strategy, created Eurasia Group’s financial markets research business and is host of the London Stock Exchange’s Navigator series. Here she talks growth, purpose and why all CAs need to develop their political quotient
For more than 25 years, Tina Fordham has been helping some of the world’s most influential leaders make sense of an increasingly chaotic and volatile world. As Wall Street’s first-ever geopolitical analyst, and as Chief Global Political Analyst during a 17-year career at Citi, she’s advised everyone from C‑suite executives to governments and the UK Ministry of Defence.
And today, the rest of us are just catching up with her. Geopolitics – the way countries project power and pursue interests beyond their borders – has moved firmly into the boardroom, shaping the environment in which businesses, investors and governments operate. Use of the word ‘geopolitics’ in company documents rose by 600% in 2022 according to the Harvard Business Review, while a 2024 study for EY found 94% of business leaders allocating more resources to that other G word: geostrategy.
In her new book, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, Tina draws on her vast experience to help leaders understand what global upheaval means for their organisations and how they can best respond. It’s not all doom and gloom: her message is one of pragmatic optimism. Uncertainty is hardly new; we just need better tools – and a more realistic understanding of the world – to navigate it. Once we all stop waiting for a return to some mythical state of stability, she argues, we’ll be in a much better position to recognise that “opportunity and risk are two sides of the same coin”.
For more than 25 years, Tina Fordham has been helping some of the world’s most influential leaders make sense of an increasingly chaotic and volatile world. As Wall Street’s first-ever geopolitical analyst, and as Chief Global Political Analyst during a 17-year career at Citi, she’s advised everyone from C‑suite executives to governments and the UK Ministry of Defence.
And today, the rest of us are just catching up with her. Geopolitics – the way countries project power and pursue interests beyond their borders – has moved firmly into the boardroom, shaping the environment in which businesses, investors and governments operate. Use of the word ‘geopolitics’ in company documents rose by 600% in 2022 according to the Harvard Business Review, while a 2024 study for EY found 94% of business leaders allocating more resources to that other G word: geostrategy.
In her new book, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, Tina draws on her vast experience to help leaders understand what global upheaval means for their organisations and how they can best respond. It’s not all doom and gloom: her message is one of pragmatic optimism. Uncertainty is hardly new; we just need better tools – and a more realistic understanding of the world – to navigate it. Once we all stop waiting for a return to some mythical state of stability, she argues, we’ll be in a much better position to recognise that “opportunity and risk are two sides of the same coin”.
Some think the world’s only just become volatile but people have been telling me ‘the world’s gone mad’ for 25 years. That’s why I called my book Mad World. Our perception of risk and opportunity comes down to mindset. Maybe that’s not a blinding insight, but that people have been thinking the world is spinning out of control for 25 years tells us something about our expectations, and how they’re out of kilter with reality.
People seem constantly surprised that anything bad happens. That’s particularly true in the developed world and, I would say, especially in the UK. That disconnect is very odd to me, as is the expectation of continuous growth, prosperity and stability against the odds.
If a chief intelligence officer, board member or fund manager believes mean reversion will always prevail, there’s nothing you can tell them. They won’t believe it until the signal has broken through, but geopolitical signals happen too late. It’s very hard for investors to think about signal and noise. They just don’t have the vocabulary or the frameworks to contend with this type of disruption.
It’s a myth that things were ever predictable and stable. Often, in the boardroom, you hear, ‘Well, I prefer to be an optimist.’ I say, ‘Go ahead, I prefer to look at evidence, and then find the opportunities in reality, rather than deluding myself into thinking that the world is in a different state.’ I sometimes refer to my approach as behavioural geopolitics.
I use Madeleine Albright’s phrase: ‘I’m not a fatalist, I’m an optimist who worries a lot.’
There are a lot of middle-power countries paralysed by this US-China competition, when what we need to be doing is preparing for a time of reduced dependencies on either the United States or China.
It’s in the data that Trump is the least popular American president at this stage of his presidency in 50 years. That’s true. But that hasn’t been translated into an advantage for the opposition Democrats. His popularity is around 34%; Democrats, as a party, their popularity is around 28%. Also he hasn’t used Congress for a while so the idea that a divided Congress would break him I think is fanciful.
The midterms will take the temperature of the US public, who overwhelmingly do not like the war in Iran. It’s possibly the least popular war in quite some time. The pressures on Trump are actually increasing at the same time as his political support is moderating – but that doesn’t mean that he will.
Geopolitics, the super-cycle, isn’t a storm that will pass – it’s the climate changing. For 20 years, I had to convince people that geopolitics mattered. In the last five years, that’s changed and now they get it. I started writing about the Crimea annexation in 2018 when I was at Citi. I was told it was a storm in a teacup and of no relevance. It may not have been market-moving, but it’s a data point in an emerging trend line. It wasn’t until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 when the penny really dropped.
Some think the world’s only just become volatile but people have been telling me ‘the world’s gone mad’ for 25 years. That’s why I called my book Mad World. Our perception of risk and opportunity comes down to mindset. Maybe that’s not a blinding insight, but that people have been thinking the world is spinning out of control for 25 years tells us something about our expectations, and how they’re out of kilter with reality.
People seem constantly surprised that anything bad happens. That’s particularly true in the developed world and, I would say, especially in the UK. That disconnect is very odd to me, as is the expectation of continuous growth, prosperity and stability against the odds.
If a chief intelligence officer, board member or fund manager believes mean reversion will always prevail, there’s nothing you can tell them. They won’t believe it until the signal has broken through, but geopolitical signals happen too late. It’s very hard for investors to think about signal and noise. They just don’t have the vocabulary or the frameworks to contend with this type of disruption.
It’s a myth that things were ever predictable and stable. Often, in the boardroom, you hear, ‘Well, I prefer to be an optimist.’ I say, ‘Go ahead, I prefer to look at evidence, and then find the opportunities in reality, rather than deluding myself into thinking that the world is in a different state.’ I sometimes refer to my approach as behavioural geopolitics.
I use Madeleine Albright’s phrase: ‘I’m not, a fatalist, I’m an optimist who worries a lot.’
There are a lot of middle-power countries paralysed by this US-China competition, when what we need to be doing is preparing for a time of reduced dependencies on either the United States or China.
It’s in the data that Trump is the least popular American president at this stage of his presidency in 50 years. That’s true. But that hasn’t been translated into an advantage for the opposition Democrats. His popularity is around 34%; Democrats, as a party, their popularity is around 28%. Also he hasn’t used Congress for a while so the idea that a divided Congress would break him I think is fanciful.
The midterms will take the temperature of the US public, who overwhelmingly do not like the war in Iran. It’s possibly the least popular war in quite some time. The pressures on Trump are actually increasing at the same time as his political support is moderating – but that doesn’t mean that he will.
Geopolitics, the super-cycle, isn’t a storm that will pass – it’s the climate changing. For 20 years, I had to convince people that geopolitics mattered. In the last five years, that’s changed and now they get it. I started writing about the Crimea annexation in 2018 when I was at Citi. I was told it was a storm in a teacup and of no relevance. It may not have been market moving, but it’s a data point in an emerging trend line. It wasn’t until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 when the penny really dropped.
Education
Studied English and comparative literature at San Francisco State University; earned a master’s in post‑Soviet studies from Columbia University
1998
Appointed Graduate Research Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow and Graduate Researcher, Institute for War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
1999
Made Senior Researcher at the ISAR Azerbaijan in Baku; appointed Director, Global Political Risk, Eurasia Group
2003
Joined Citi as Managing Director & Chief Global Political Analyst, a role she held until 2020
2004
Served as Senior Adviser, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
2016
Joined UN High‑Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment
2017
Joined International Advisory Boards of Columbia University and Cambridge University Centre for Geopolitics
2021
Appointed Major of British Army Staff Corps, advising MoD and senior military leadership
2022
Founded Fordham Global Foresight
Education
Studied English and comparative literature at San Francisco State University; earned a master’s in post‑Soviet studies from Columbia University
1998
Appointed Graduate Research Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow and Graduate Researcher, Institute for War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
1999
Made Senior Researcher at the ISAR Azerbaijan in Baku; appointed Director, Global Political Risk, Eurasia Group
2003
Joined Citi as Managing Director & Chief Global Political Analyst, a role she held until 2020
2004
Served as Senior Adviser, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
2016
Joined UN High‑Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment
2017
Joined International Advisory Boards of Columbia University and Cambridge University Centre for Geopolitics
2021
Appointed Major of British Army Staff Corps, advising MoD and senior military leadership
2022
Founded Fordham Global Foresight
Some of the firms I work with have huge risk appetite, expanding into commodities, critical minerals, frontier markets and so on. But a policy-expert friend of mine described the British psyche as, ‘We have tramways, and we stay on them.’ We make a decision and keep doing it. It may mean we’re reliable and dependable, but not agile in the way that we see the world, and not opportunistic.
Europe is a superpower by all kinds of metrics, but doesn’t act like one. The UK thinks it’s more prosperous than it is and doesn’t take enough notice of the changing winds, the opportunities and the competitive advantages.
Opportunity and risk are two sides of the same coin, so you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.
Plenty of firms bring in a retired diplomat or general once a year to talk about their conversations with Putin. That’s not systematic: [geopolitical strategy] needs to be a planning assumption, and across business lines, not sitting in the risk division. We all need to get our heads around this.
Accountancy-based approaches to classifying risks are a little bit out of date. It’s putting them to one side, whereas it needs to be an integrated, contextualised approach to business. But business schools aren’t teaching geopolitics in financial education, they’re still teaching balance sheets and P&L accounts.
I’m developing executive education courses in geopolitics with Columbia University. The University of Oxford under William Hague has just launched something similar. More of this is happening, but we’ve got to take it out of the realm of academic international affairs and into real life.
Things are changing, though: the angle that I’m given for presentations has moved away from ‘tell us about the world hot spots, so that we can factor that into our planning assumptions’ to ‘tell us how to think about global change’.
The key thing is for everyone to develop political quotient (PQ) alongside IQ and EQ. With the PQ idea, challenge assumptions and understand that everything is on a continuum, instead of the traditional financial zero-and-one scoring, which assumes that something either will or won’t happen.
In 2004 I worked for the Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair] strategy unit on a failed project called Investing in Prevention. We developed an elaborate framework for preventing risks and investing in guardrails. It was dead on arrival. Why? Governments don’t like to spend money on things that might not happen on their watch. Businesses are the same. Boards and excos [executive committees] only like to look at operational risks – everything else is out of their comfort zone. It feels fanciful.
But an enforcement mechanism is starting to bubble up. In June, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority issued a demand for all the companies it covers to report on their geopolitical exposures. This change is coming. It’s going to be tricky to design, and to enforce, but I was working for a large financial institution at the time when the gender pay reporting demands came through, and that data didn’t exist and had to be collected from scratch.
Given the febrile state of affairs where being a US ally no longer provides security, and China and Russia are also hostile, all of these ‘middle powers’ need to take more proactive steps to understand their dependencies. Documenting that geopolitical exposure will come in, so we will be moving, fairly swiftly, from the realm of the abstract to reality.
There are three things I would like to see in the UK Budget. Firstly, I’m an adviser to the Ministry of Defence, and one of the messages that needs to get out very clearly here is that our democracies, our societies, won’t continue to flourish without a strong defence. Investing in defence and security is investing in the country and its future. That’s a tough sell, especially for people who don’t think the threat is real.
Secondly, I want to see entrepreneurialism as a driver and something that is untethered. Making it easier for people to be self-employed and hire other people is a growth engine. We’ve got to change the mentality about work and productivity – building wealth is something everybody can aspire to.
And the third point: infrastructure. Make it easier to build infrastructure and housing. It is essential.
“I want to see entrepreneurialism as a driver and something that is untethered. Making it easier for people to be self-employed and hire other people is a growth engine”
Nowadays learning to live with discomfort is key. People in emerging markets are used to this. Talk to a Brazilian or a Lebanese person about politics: they’re used to inflation and corruption and their muscles are more developed in dealing with adversity, whereas in more developed market countries that haven’t experienced such conflict and upheaval for decades, it’s more like, ‘Well, why is this happening?’
You have to be optimistic, or you wouldn’t get out of bed, and the world is, by so many measures, better now than it’s ever been, whether it’s health or longevity. We must keep that in mind. When it comes to medical research, for example, the breakthroughs from AI will be tremendous.
Doing things for other people is what makes you feel better. It’s all about service, purpose and taking control of your life. I created my frameworks for leaders to help them not feel powerless in these times.
The world is still amazing – we also owe it to our children to communicate that, too. But we’ve got to adapt and look for opportunities, rather than wait for them to appear.
Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders is out now (Whitefox, £20.99)
Sign up to ICAS’ Bank of England briefing in London
Some of the firms I work with have huge risk appetite, expanding into commodities, critical minerals, frontier markets and so on. But a policy-expert friend of mine described the British psyche as, ‘We have tramways, and we stay on them.’ We make a decision and keep doing it. It may mean we’re reliable and dependable, but not agile in the way that we see the world, and not opportunistic.
Europe is a superpower by all kinds of metrics, but doesn’t act like one. The UK thinks it’s more prosperous than it is and doesn’t take enough notice of the changing winds, the opportunities and the competitive advantages.
Opportunity and risk are two sides of the same coin, so you can’t talk about one without talking about the other.
Plenty of firms bring in a retired diplomat or general once a year to talk about their conversations with Putin. That’s not systematic: [geopolitical strategy] needs to be a planning assumption, and across business lines, not sitting in the risk division. We all need to get our heads around this.
Accountancy-based approaches to classifying risks are a little bit out of date. It’s putting them to one side, whereas it needs to be an integrated, contextualised approach to business. But business schools aren’t teaching geopolitics in financial education, they’re still teaching balance sheets and P&L accounts.
I’m developing executive education courses in geopolitics with Columbia University. The University of Oxford under William Hague has just launched something similar. More of this is happening, but we’ve got to take it out of the realm of academic international affairs and into real life.
Things are changing, though: the angle that I’m given for presentations has moved away from ‘tell us about the world hot spots, so that we can factor that into our planning assumptions’ to ‘tell us how to think about global change’.
The key thing is for everyone to develop political quotient (PQ) alongside IQ and EQ. With the PQ idea, challenge assumptions and understand that everything is on a continuum, instead of the traditional financial zero and one scoring, which assumes that something either will or won’t happen.
In 2004 I worked for the Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair] strategy unit on a failed project called Investing in Prevention. We developed an elaborate framework for preventing risks and investing in guardrails. It was dead on arrival. Why? Governments don’t like to spend money on things that might not happen on their watch. Businesses are the same. Boards and excos [executive committees] only like to look at operational risks – everything else is out of their comfort zone. It feels fanciful.
But an enforcement mechanism is starting to bubble up. In June, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority issued a demand for all the companies it covers to report on their geopolitical exposures. This change is coming. It’s going to be tricky to design, and to enforce, but I was working for a large financial institution at the time when the gender pay reporting demands came through, and that data didn’t exist and had to be collected from scratch.
Given the febrile state of affairs where being a US ally no longer provides security, and China and Russia are also hostile, all of these ‘middle powers’ need to take more proactive steps to understand their dependencies (on those superpowers).
There are three things I would like to see in the UK Budget. Firstly, I’m an adviser to the Ministry of Defence, and one of the messages that needs to get out very clearly here is that our democracies, our societies, won’t continue to flourish without a strong defence. Investing in defence and security is investing in the country and its future. That’s a tough sell, especially for people who don’t think the threat is real.
Secondly, I want to see entrepreneurialism as a driver and something that is untethered. Making it easier for people to be self-employed and hire other people is a growth engine. We’ve got to change the mentality about work and productivity – building wealth is something everybody can aspire to.
And the third point: infrastructure. Make it easier to build infrastructure and housing. It is essential.
“I want to see entrepreneurialism as a driver and something that is untethered. Making it easier for people to be self-employed and hire other people is a growth engine”
Nowadays learning to live with discomfort is key. People in emerging markets are used to this. Talk to a Brazilian or a Lebanese person about politics: they’re used to inflation and corruption and their muscles are more developed in dealing with adversity, whereas in more developed market countries that haven’t experienced such conflict and upheaval for decades, it’s more like, ‘Well, why is this happening?’
You have to be optimistic, or you wouldn’t get out of bed, and the world is, by so many measures, better now than it’s ever been, whether it’s health or longevity. We must keep that in mind. When it comes to medical research, for example, the breakthroughs from AI will be tremendous.
Doing things for other people is what makes you feel better. It’s all about service, purpose and taking control of your life. I created my frameworks for leaders to help them not feel powerless in these times.
The world is still amazing – we also owe it to our children to communicate that, too. But we’ve got to adapt and look for opportunities, rather than wait for them to appear.
Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders is out now (Whitefox, £20.99)
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