Geoeconomic Resilience Is Now A CEO Job

When the Strait of Hormuz closed to commercial traffic this spring, Maersk suspended crossings and rerouted its Middle East services around the Cape of Good Hope within days. Carriers that had already worked through closure scenarios moved first; the rest spent those days assessing their exposure. The difference was not in forecasting; no one predicted the timing. The difference was a decision that had been vetted in advance and only needed to be executed.

That difference is now a CEO matter because geoeconomic shocks no longer arrive one at a time. Tariffs, export controls, sanctions and chokepoint closures come in waves, and each wave hits somewhere in your network. In my research on 73 large firms in aerospace, pharmaceuticals and high tech, resilience and geopolitical-risk language in annual filings rose sixfold from 2007 to 2025. Disclosure has caught up with reality. In most companies, management discipline has not.

Start with a simple test. Can you name the single supplier, shipping lane or jurisdiction whose loss would halt or severely disrupt your largest revenue line tomorrow? Not a list from the risk committee—you, personally, today. If the answer is no, geoeconomic resilience at your company is a report, not a capability. The firms that keep moving when rivals freeze are not clairvoyant. They run resilience as a standing management discipline with three parts, and a leadership team can begin all three within 90 days.

1. Simulate. Stress-test the network before the world does. Require a one-page exposure map for every major corridor, production site, and supplier country, and run at least one rigorous geoeconomic stress test each year: a chokepoint closure, an export-control expansion or a sudden tariff wall. The output that matters is not the forecast; it is the pre-cleared decision. No carrier knew when Hormuz would close. The ones that moved first knew what they would do when it did.

2. Shape. Build the flexibility you will need before you need it: a ceiling on how much of any critical input comes from a single country, a qualified second source or site for each major product line, and two viable routings for every high-volume lane. This is where the CEO is not optional. Flexibility loses to unit cost in every quarterly review unless you make optionality an explicit criterion in capital allocation. Apple did not move roughly a quarter of iPhone assembly to India through a middle-management initiative.

3. Synchronize. The gap that hurts most is the one between what a government decides on Tuesday and what your network does by Friday. Close it structurally: align government affairs, legal and operations on a single weekly cadence, with a named senior owner and the authority to act. When a customer is blacklisted or an export is restricted, the response should be execution, not a scramble.

The cost of skipping this work is documented. According to McKinsey, supply-chain disruptions can erase nearly 45 percent of a year’s profits over a decade, and AlixPartners estimates that the 2021 chip shortage alone cost automakers roughly $210 billion in revenue. In case after case, the exposure had been flagged in advance; what was missing was an owner. Boards have begun to respond. CrowdStrike’s chief resilience officer reports directly to the CEO, and Allianz Commercial has placed risk and resilience at the board level. Siemens exited Russia on its own timeline because it had already mapped the exposure, and TSMC began diversifying years before events would have forced it. The pattern is consistent: The companies that fare best treat geoeconomic resilience as governance, not as a project.

So Monday morning, ask your team the single-point-of-failure question and see whether anyone can answer it. Ask for the date of the last geoeconomic stress test and the decision it pre-cleared. Ask, by name, who owns the weekly synchronization of government policy, geopolitical risk and global operations. If those three questions have answers, you are ahead of most of the field: nearly every firm I studied now discloses these risks; few of the executives I interviewed could identify a single accountable owner. If they do not, you have your agenda. The next trade-policy shock or chokepoint closure will arrive on its own schedule. What is on yours is whether your company freezes, moves or advances.