Musical groups including Willie Nelson, Barenaked Ladies, Heart, and Cheap Trick canceled shows at SeaWorld. 4 Actress Olivia Wilde was just one among many who took to Twitter.Īnimal rights groups seized the initiative. 3 Released soon after SeaWorld’s initial public offering in 2013, the movie captured the attention of celebrities and quickly went viral. 2 Cowperthwaite spent the next two years making a low-budget investigative documentary called Blackfish, which depicted how SeaWorld’s treatment of orcas harmed both the animals and their human trainers. In 2010, Cowperthwaite happened to read a tragic story about how an orca named Tilikum killed veteran trainer Dawn Brancheau in the middle of a show at SeaWorld’s Orlando park. It all started with a Los Angeles documentary filmmaker named Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who liked taking her twins to see the orcas perform at the SeaWorld theme park in San Diego. Not just any kind of political risk, but twenty-first-century political risk, where the political actions of small groups, or even lone individuals, supercharged by connective technologies, can dramatically impact businesses of all kinds. Companies that don’t get these basics right are more likely to get blindsided.Ītchison and SeaWorld were blindsided by political risk. Organizations that take a serious, systematic approach to political risk management are likely to be surprised less often and recover better.

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.

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. In today’s globalized world, there are no “safe” bets.

The very institutions and laws that were supposed to reduce business uncertainty and risk are often having the opposite effect. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. 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.

Political Risk by Condoleezza Rice