In the first part of this series, we argued that senior executives have not been ignoring geopolitics. They have been operating on stability assumptions built for a world that no longer exists.
Most CEOs understand, at some level, that the world has become more volatile. What has not kept pace is the planning: geopolitical risk has not been given the same weight as financial or operational risk. No team owns it. No process tracks it.
That changes by treating geopolitical exposure the way a disciplined investor treats portfolio risk: not as a single event to survive, but as a set of exposures to manage over time.
The portfolio lens
Portfolio managers do this by design. A well-constructed investment portfolio does not try to predict which asset will fall. It is built so that when some assets fall, others hold, and the overall position remains viable.
Similarly, the goal is not to predict the next disruption. It is to build a position where no single disruption can produce a catastrophic outcome.
Knowing where your exposure actually lives turns out to be harder than it sounds.
Only 30% of CEOs have full visibility into their company’s exposure to political risk across operations, markets, and suppliers. The other 70% are carrying exposure they have not mapped.
That finding, from EY-Parthenon’s 2025 Geostrategic Outlook, points to a simple truth: you cannot manage what you have not seen.
Mapping the exposure
The first step in building a geopolitical portfolio is a structured audit of where your business touches geopolitically sensitive terrain, across four categories.
- Supply chain dependencies. Where do your critical inputs come from, and how exposed is that source, or the relevant trade routes, to political instability?
- Market exposure. How dependent is your revenue on markets or customer segments sensitive to geopolitical conditions, including the decisions of your largest clients?
- Financing conditions. How exposed is your access to capital to lenders repricing regional risk, even before that risk is noticeable in the rest of the operation?
- Regulatory and compliance terrain. How exposed are your operations to sanctions, export controls, or trade policy shaped by decisions made far outside your own market?
The output is not a list of dangers. It is a map of concentrations, the places where a single disruption could generate outsized consequences. Those concentrations are what the portfolio approach addresses.
Diversification as a strategic discipline
Once exposure is mapped, diversification becomes a deliberate strategic choice.
Supply chain diversification has moved from theoretical recommendation to measurable trend. Research published in the Journal of Supply Chain Management in late 2025 found companies fundamentally rethinking sourcing locations in response to geopolitical rivalry.
Reshoring, nearshoring, and what practitioners call ‘friendshoring’ (concentrating supply relationships within politically allied or stable partner networks, rather than chasing the lowest cost) are now standard elements of strategy across contested corridors.
For Greek companies, this carries specific implications.
Greece sits inside the EU regulatory and trade framework, positioning it as a natural beneficiary of the European shift toward supply chain regionalization: EU legal certainty, geographic proximity to both European and Eastern Mediterranean markets, and manufacturing competencies that remain underutilized relative to the region’s strategic position.
The companies that build on this positioning early will be better placed when the next reshoring wave arrives.
The same logic extends to where your revenue comes from. A business generating most of its income from a single market, or from markets with correlated geopolitical exposure, carries an unexamined and unintended concentration risk, just as a business sourcing from a single region does.
The cost dimension of all this is real and should be named. Diversifying away from lowest-cost sources or familiar markets raises costs in the near term, while building backup capacity into suppliers requires investment.
These are not reasons to avoid the work.
They are variables to factor into the planning, the same way a company accounts for the cost of insurance without treating insurance as optional.
The companies that delay because diversification is expensive will face a harder version of the same problem when a disruption forces the issue without preparation time. The cost has not disappeared. It has only been delayed.
Scenario planning as a planning tool, not a forecasting exercise
Most companies do not resist scenario planning because they lack intelligence. They resist it because they treat it as if it were prediction.
Scenario planning for geopolitical risk is not about forecasting which conflict will escalate. It is about stress-testing strategic assumptions against plausible futures. The World Economic Forum describes this as cross-functional teams connecting geopolitical analysis to business functions, paired with protocols that prepare the organization for multiple futures rather than one predicted outcome.
In practice, this means asking a different kind of question.
Instead of asking ‘what do we expect to happen,’ ask ‘what would have to happen for our current strategy to fail.’
Then ask how likely each of those scenarios actually is, given what you can already see developing in the region.
For most Greek businesses, three scenarios are worth stress-testing:
- An escalation in Eastern Mediterranean tensions affecting energy pricing or regional credit conditions.
- A further fragmentation of global trade that accelerates European supply chain regionalization.
- A shift in EU policy driven by the pressures reshaping European institutions from within.
None of these requires a prediction. Each requires knowing, in advance, how your strategy would perform if the scenario materialized.
The institutional response: where this is heading
The organizational response to sustained geopolitical volatility is still forming, but the direction is visible.
The World Economic Forum has documented the emergence of the Chief Geopolitical Officer as a new executive role, following the same pattern as the Chief Sustainability Officer and the Chief Information Security Officer: roles that became necessary when a once-peripheral risk became a material business reality.
This is not where most mid-sized Greek companies are today.
But the companies that build even basic geopolitical risk architecture now, including exposure mapping, scenario stress-testing, and diversification planning with realistic cost assumptions built in, will not be starting from zero when the pressure to formalize increases. And it will increase.
KPMG’s Top Geopolitical Risks report, drawing on interviews with more than 100 senior practitioners across global sectors, makes the institutional expectation explicit: geopolitical risk is becoming a board-level concern, managed best as a planning discipline rather than a reactive function.
What this requires of leadership
None of this requires a geopolitics specialist on the payroll. It requires the willingness to treat strategic uncertainty as something to be planned for rather than reacted to.
The capability gap is not analytical. It is organizational. Geopolitical risk needs to be assigned to someone, connected to planning processes, and reviewed with the same regularity as financial exposure.
The executives who have built this capability describe it less as a knowledge problem than as a habit problem: the discipline of asking the geopolitical question in rooms where it has not traditionally been asked.
Greece’s position in the Eastern Mediterranean is not going to become less complicated. Energy corridor competition, EU and NATO dynamics, and proximity to active instability are intensifying, not resolving.
That is, simultaneously, a source of material risk and a source of strategic opportunity for companies that understand how to read the terrain.
The map has changed. The territory demands a different kind of navigation.
SOURCES
[1] EY-Parthenon 2025 Geostrategic Outlook — https://www.ey.com/en_gr/insights/geostrategy/2025-geostrategic-outlook
[2] KPMG Top Geopolitical Risks 2025 — https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/lv/pdf/2025/top-geopolitical-risks-2025-web.pdf
[3] World Economic Forum: Why every company now needs a Chief Geopolitical Officer — https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/chief-geopolitical-officer-business/
[4] Journal of Supply Chain Management: Geopolitical Rivalry and Supply Chain Design, November 2025 — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09537287.2025.2570203
This article was originally published in The CEO Foresight, the LinkedIn Newsletter of CEO Clubs Greece.
