Episode XIII: She Means Business

Tina Fordham, leading geostrategist

Tina Fordham has spent more than 25 years studying what happens when politics, power, business and uncertainty collide.

She is a leading geostrategist and adviser to boards, CEOs, investors, governments and military leaders. She was Wall Street’s original Chief Global Political Analyst, spending 17 years at Citi, where she helped establish political analysis as a distinct research discipline alongside economics and financial markets. Before that, she built Eurasia Group’s financial-markets research business, the first of its kind for institutional investors. Today, she is the founder of Fordham Global Foresight and author of Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders.

Tina describes herself as having “the access of an insider, with the perspective of an outsider.” And when you look at her journey, you understand why.

She began not as a financier, but as a literature student fascinated by a world in transformation. The fall of the Berlin Wall took her towards history rather than simply reading about it - teaching in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, living in Russia and conducting fieldwork across Eastern Europe before studying at Columbia and eventually arriving on Wall Street.

But today, I want to explore the making of Tina Fordham.

The outsider who convinced Wall Street it needed a job that didn’t yet exist. The single mother and sole breadwinner navigating motherhood and the global financial crisis while becoming a Managing Director. The woman who championed women’s economic empowerment, eventually walked away from the security of a major institution, bet on herself and became an entrepreneur.

And now, the author of the thought-provoking book, Mad World, A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, is asking a question every leader should be considering: How do we lead when certainty has disappeared?