Description

From New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Stanford University professor Amy B. Zegart comes an examination of the rapidly evolving state of political risk, and how to navigate it.

The world is changing fast. Political risk-the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company’s business-is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. The very institutions and laws that were supposed to reduce business uncertainty and risk are often having the opposite effect. In today’s globalized world, there are no “safe” bets.

POLITICAL RISK investigates and analyzes this evolving landscape, what businesses can do to navigate it, and what all of us can learn about how to better understand and grapple with these rapidly changing global political dynamics. Drawing on lessons from the successes and failures of companies across multiple industries as well as examples from aircraft carrier operations, NASA missions, and other unusual places, POLITICAL RISK offers a first-of-its-kind framework that can be deployed in any organization, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Organizations that take a serious, systematic approach to political risk management are likely to be surprised less often and recover better. Companies that don’t get these basics right are more likely to get blindsided.

Meet The Author: Condoleezza Rice

Philip Zelikow is an attorney, diplomat, academic, and author. He has worked as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and Counselor of the United States Department of State. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and was American Academy in Berlin Axel Springer Fellow in the fall of 2009. Zelikow has served in the George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama administrations.

Condoleezza Rice was the sixty-sixth US secretary of state and the first black woman to hold that office. Prior to that, she was the first woman to serve as national security advisor. She is a professor at Stanford University and cofounder of RiceHadleyGates LLC. Rice is the author of No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011) and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010), both New York Times best sellers, and more recently, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017).
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