Political Risk

How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

Contributors

By Condoleezza Rice

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$19.99

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$25.99 CAD

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.

  • "Rice and Zegart's POLITICAL RISK should be read by every business leader. Any company that fails to learn and apply the lessons of this wise and practical book can quickly find itself in rapid decline. But equally, those who become skilled at its application can do more than merely mitigate such risks; they can thrive upon them. Well-written and chock-full of compelling case stories wrapped inside a coherent conceptual framework, POLITICAL RISK gets and keeps your attention, page after page. We cannot predict the future, but -- with the help of this marvelous masterwork--- we can prepare for it."
    Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and co-author of Great by Choice and Built to Last
  • "Smart. Informative. Overdue. Will completely change the way you think about political risk."
    Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and Alphabet, Inc.
  • "Secretary Rice and Dr. Zegart have melded their professional experiences of managing political risk at the highest levels with other case studies into a uniquely useful and profound book."
    Frederick W. Smith, chairman & CEO, FedEx Corporation
  • "Political risk was once centered on honest-to-goodness political actors -- governments, central banks and the like. But as Rice and Zegart clearly show, technology has forever changed who counts as a 'political actor.' This book is truly excellent, both for tracing how far the political risk field has come in the last two decades, and how much further it has left to go."
    Ian Bremmer, president, Eurasia Group
  • "Clearly written and timely, this book will interest not only current and future business executives but also would-be-whistle-blowers and corporate watchdogs."
    Publishers Weekly

On Sale
May 21, 2019
Page Count
336 pages
Publisher
Twelve
ISBN-13
9781455542345

Condoleezza Rice

About the Author

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).

Learn more about this author