Written by: Marco Tiozzo Fasiolo Americas Director Kilpatrick Executive
For two decades, we’ve told rising leaders the same story: master the hard skills (finance, operations, data), sharpen the soft skills (communication, empathy, influence), and the C-suite door will open. That formula is no longer enough.
The executives standing apart in 2026 share a third capability that is rarely taught in MBA programs and rarely listed in a job description: geopolitical literacy. And the data is getting hard to ignore.
In McKinsey’s most recent global survey on economic conditions, geopolitical instability now outranks macroeconomic volatility, cybersecurity, and even technological disruption as the chief risk to growth. Yet only one-third of executives say they are confident in their organization’s ability to manage trade policy changes (McKinsey, Leading amid geopolitical upheaval, November 2025).
The EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook adds a striking number: more than one-third of CEOs expect geopolitical disruption to be among the top disruptive forces in the next 12 months, but only 30% have full visibility into their company’s exposure to political risk across operations, markets, and suppliers (EY, 2025 Geostrategic Outlook).
And the 2026 Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance reports that fewer than 40% of directors believe their organizations have an adequate strategy for managing geopolitical risk (Top 5 Corporate Governance Priorities for 2026, April 2026).
Translation: the risk is now priced into every strategic decision, but most leadership teams still can’t read the board.
Three structural shifts explain why geopolitical fluency has become a differentiating capability rather than a nice-to-have:
1. The rules-based system that underwrote global business has fractured. The World Economic Forum notes that the Geopolitical Risk with Trade (GPRT) index surged roughly 30% from 2020 to 2024 compared with the previous two decades, and the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index nearly tripled in the same period (WEF, Why every company now needs a Chief Geopolitical Officer, July 2025). Supply chains, capital flows, tax regimes, and technology standards no longer converge — they diverge.
2. CEOs are being pulled into geopolitical roles they didn’t seek. Axios recently observed that “every statement, partnership, and market entry strategy now sits inside a broader political system defined by speed and scrutiny” (A new era of risk for the modern CEO, April 2026). At Davos this year, it was a multinational CEO — not a head of state — calling publicly for a stronger NATO. That is the new job description, whether leaders wanted it or not.
3. A new C-suite role is emerging in front of our eyes. The World Economic Forum argues that the Chief Geopolitical Officer (CGO) is following the same trajectory as the Chief Sustainability Officer and the CISO before it: a peripheral concern elevated to existential business imperative. McKinsey and Russell Reynolds both report that Fortune 500 companies are now hiring executives specifically for their diplomatic and geopolitical expertise.
This is not about memorizing headlines or holding strong political opinions. Based on the frameworks from KPMG’s Top Geopolitical Risks 2025, EY’s Geostrategic Outlook, and the BCI’s Resilience Vision 2030 Report, the skill breaks down into four practical muscles:
The BCI’s Resilience Vision 2030 research found that 68.4% of professionals identify strategic leadership and 56.1% risk management as the most critical future competencies — and geopolitical knowledge was named alongside them as essential, not separate.
Here is the part most executives underestimate: geopolitical literacy compounds your other skills. Your financial modelling gets sharper because you price scenarios correctly. Your negotiations improve because you understand the counterparty’s national context. Your storytelling lands because you can explain why the world is moving this way to a nervous team or an activist shareholder.
Soft skills help you lead people. Hard skills help you run a business. Geopolitical skills help you see where both are going.
The CEOs thriving in 2026 aren’t necessarily the ones who predicted every shock. They’re the ones who built the habit of reading the world as carefully as they read their own balance sheet.
If you’re an aspiring executive, the question isn’t whether to add this skill. It’s how quickly you can start.
What are you reading to sharpen your geopolitical thinking? I’d love to hear which sources are shaping how you see the next 12 months.
Sources:
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