584: ESSEC Business School Professor on How Geopolitics Shapes Corporate Strategy

The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving

Srividya Jandhyala, professor of management at ESSEC Business School and author of The Great Disruption, offers a clear framework for how geopolitics is reshaping corporate strategy. Her central thesis is direct:

"The fundamental idea, 'Where are you from?'—the nationality of the company—is the defining feature of the type of reactions you face from all stakeholders, not just governments, but also customers, suppliers, and clients".

She explains why geopolitics now sits inside business decisions rather than adjacent to them. Corporate choices create externalities that trigger responses from states and nonmarket actors. For example, decisions around semiconductors illustrate how commercial moves collide with concerns about national security and dependence in key markets. The implication is that access, permissions, and standards increasingly compete with price and product as decisive variables.

Jandhyala distills four structural foundations every multinational should monitor:

• Market access — Where tariffs, export controls, or rivalries may close doors.

• Level playing field — Corporate nationality can tilt advantage or disadvantage against competitors.

• Investment security — Whether assets, workforce, and property rights will be safe and returns can be repatriated.

• Institutional alignment — The "USB vs. power plug" analogy: some systems work seamlessly, while others clash. Geopolitics is increasingly a contest of standards

Practical Takeaways

• Build a repeatable discipline. Go beyond headline news by scanning developments, personalizing them to the firm's footprint, planning responses, and pivoting as conditions change.

• Map exposure by corporate nationality. Quantify where origin shapes market permissions, customer sentiment, or partner constraints.

• Treat corporate diplomacy as a core capability. Relationship-building with governments and stakeholders now consumes significant CEO time, creating both opportunities and trade-offs.

• For CEOs: View geopolitical flux as a field for advantage, not just risk. "Be imaginative about how you can exploit your corporate nationality, your position in the value chain, and your global market presence."

• For middle managers: Expect new roles and metrics; government engagement, redundancy planning, and cross-functional information brokering are becoming central.

• Use the right cognitive frame. Executives must decide explicitly whether and where geopolitics deserves share of mind, recognizing that equally astute observers may reach different conclusions.

Jandhyala's counsel is rigorous but pragmatic: geopolitics is now part of the operating environment. Companies that treat it as noise will miss risks and opportunities. Those that build structural awareness and corporate diplomacy into strategy will be better positioned to compete when "permissions, politics, and standards" define the terms of play.

📚 Get Srividya's book, The Great Disruption, here: https://shorturl.at/SWrdT

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