2025 Board Agendas: Geopolitics as a Core Business Variable

Talking about the future is easy. Governing through it is harder. As 2025 begins, boards are facing a familiar tension: the world is moving quickly, but corporate decision cycles are still built around quarterly reporting and annual plans. That mismatch makes geopolitics less of a "context" slide and more of an agenda driver-because shifts in policy, alliances, and regional stability can translate directly into costs, supply reliability, market access, and talent constraints.

Why geopolitics stays on the agenda

For several years, geopolitical risk has been near the top of board issue lists. Entering 2025, the challenge is not simply that tensions persist; it is that uncertainty has become harder to "bound." Political and economic volatility across multiple regions can make strategy evaluation and risk planning feel like aiming at a moving target. When management cannot confidently estimate the stability of rules, relationships, or routes, boards have to put more emphasis on agility: the ability to detect change early and reallocate resources without delay.

From headlines to operating decisions

Geopolitical change reaches companies through practical channels: trade conditions, tax posture, and workforce planning. Elections and changes in administration can shift priorities and policies in ways that affect cross-border movement of people, goods, capital, and data. As leadership changes occur, alliances and adversarial relationships can also evolve-sometimes quickly-forcing companies to revisit assumptions embedded in supply chains, customer growth plans, and risk appetite.

Optimism exists-oversight still needs scenarios

Sentiment can be constructive without being complacent. A post-election Fortune/Deloitte CEO survey reported that 84% of US CEOs were optimistic about their company's performance in the next year, and it also reflected a 7% increase in optimism for the global economy. Boards can treat that as a useful data point about executive confidence-while still insisting on disciplined planning for downside cases. Optimism is not a control. Scenarios are.

Do we have the right experience in the room?

One practical implication for boards is succession planning. Companies may want to consider directors with geopolitical or adjacent experience, yet available data suggests these backgrounds are not common in many boardrooms. The 2024 Spencer Stuart Board Index does not list domestic or international geopolitical experience among the four most common industry backgrounds for new directors. It also reports that 42% of new directors have worked abroad and 18% are from outside the United States. Those figures do not imply boards are unprepared-but they do suggest that "global complexity" may be underrepresented relative to how often it shows up in the risk register.

If adding a director with that profile is not immediately feasible, boards can still close the gap by engaging outside advisors and creating structured touchpoints. The point is not to turn board meetings into foreign policy debates. It is to ensure the board has access to informed perspectives and can challenge management's assumptions with specificity.

A governance posture that holds up in flux

Regardless of the governance mechanism-new skills on the board, a strengthened advisory network, or more frequent risk reviews-geopolitical oversight works best when it is operational. Ask for clear exposures, clear options, and clear timelines. Make management show which decisions change under which conditions. When the world shifts, the board's advantage is not prediction; it is preparedness.