在地缘政治动荡中发挥领导作用：当今首席执行官的五大当务之急（英）

upheaval: Five imperativesfor today’s CEOs Planning for “two worlds,” establishing strong external relationships, andbuilding resilient operations are key priorities for executives aiming to captureopportunities while mitigating risks. This article is a collaborative effort by Cindy Levy, Kurt Strovink, Matt Waters, and Shubham Singhal, with MatthewRoberts, representing views from McKinsey’s Geopolitics Practice. When it comes to geopolitics, today’s CEOs are navigating rugged, unpredictable terrain. Theimposition of new tariffs, export controls, investment restrictions, industrial policies, or sanctionsis disrupting organizations’ direction of travel and business executives’ carefully laid plans. Infact, it is shifting the entire competitive landscape.The CEO’s every decision, whether to pushforward, change course, or retreat, must be carefully considered—and then reconsidered. In McKinsey’s most recent global survey on economic conditions,1geopolitical instabilityoutranked macroeconomic volatility, cybersecurity, and even technological disruption as thechief risk to growth. Companies are already feeling the strain and are rerouting supply chains,absorbing higher costs, and confronting tighter talent pipelines. These shifts aren’t just temporary; they are likely to represent a permanent structural change inthe global order. But only one-third of respondents say they are confident in their organizations’ability to manage trade policy changes. Board directors, too, are often unprepared: According toMcKinseyresearch, most directors say they are ready to deal with challenges close to home butunprepared for major global crises, macroeconomic shocks, and other larger-scale forces thatare “too ambiguous to understand fully.”2 Modern CEOs—all reliably and technically proficient in finance, operations, engineering, andother traditional areas of business—now need to actively develop their geopolitical IQ. To start,they should recalibrate their corporate strategies to account fortwo likely but contrastinggeopolitical scenarios: a diversified world in which trade is rebalanced but largely open, and afragmented world in which regionalization dominates and trade restrictions expand. Regardless of which world emerges, CEOs must use their unique skills, relationships, andopportunities to turn geopolitical uncertainty into competitive advantage—as we explore in thisarticle. Their direct access to various scenarios, nerve centers, market indicators, and othersources of just-in-time business information gives them a platform for establishing andcommunicating the “house view” on geopolitics. That proprietary foresight can also drive CEOs’strategic decisions on all the small and large opportunities emerging from a changing worldorder. It’s the CEO’s input into budgets and allocation decisions that can determine whetherorganizations have the capabilities and resilience required to address and adapt to geopoliticaldisruption. And CEOs, of course, continue to play a central role in shaping externalnarratives—on Main Street, on Wall Street, and increasingly, in the geopolitical realm. Given the reach and breadth of their expertise, public and private mandates, and globalrelationships, CEOs will need to get involved in situations and discussions they may not haveparticipated in previously. But there is no avoiding it: CEOs can either help shape the geopoliticsaround them or be shaped by them. A period of intense geopolitical uncertainty Regional conflicts and trade divergences have escalated,challenging multinational corporationseverywhere. Since 2017, US–China tariffs have risen sixfold, and global trade interventions havegrown 12-fold since 2010.3As a result, many companies, particularly in the technology sector,are considering ways to diversify their production. For instance, Samsung may shift part of itssmartphone production from Vietnam to India to mitigate prospective US tariffs; about 60percent of its phones are currently made in Vietnam.4 Simultaneously, governments are tightening export controls and regulating investment flows. Asa result, industrial policy actions grew by nearly 390 percent between 2017 and 2024, primarilyin sectors like defense, semiconductors, and advanced equipment.5Over the past few months,there have also been significant (and interdependent) geopolitical shifts in trade and economicsand in security (see sidebar, “A closer look at several critical trends”). A closer look at several critical trends Two of the mostcommon—and most interdependent—geopolitical shifts lately are in trade andeconomics, and in security. —Geopolitical shifts in trade and economicsare reshaping global competition and addingcomplexity to supply chains. Regional and bilateral trade agreements have increased by nearly athird since 2017, creating new trade corridors but also complicating global commerce.Governments are doubling down on domestic industrial policies, such as the US InflationReduction Act and India’s Mak