Crises, geopolitics, and the boardroom

Campbell is a Burnley football club supporter with deep roots in the Labour Party. Stewart was a Conservative MP with a close relationship with King Charles. Indeed, before the pair teamed up for a podcast project, they had never met - Campbell put out a Twitter poll asking who he should have as a co-host, and, to his surprise, Stewart topped it and then said yes.

It is those points of difference, and their contrasting banks of knowledge, that has helped contribute to the success of their podcast, The Rest is Politics. One of the most downloaded podcasts in the UK and also with a strong Irish audience, it has given birth to a host of live events.

The easy rapport between the two men was on show at the recent launch of the Board Leadership Centre (BLC) in Dublin. According to Ryan McCarthy, the KPMG partner who heads up the BLC in Ireland and who introduced the proceedings, the forum is “an initiative which aims to help board members navigate key issues by sharing ideas, information, and insights.”

At the event, Campbell and Stewart shared their own experiences of serving on boards, but also, drawing from their own expertise and political connections, talked about the wider geopolitical and economic issues that boards need to have on their radar. 

In his lifetime, Alastair Campbell said “I cannot recall a time when the world has been grappling with so many different complex challenges that have the potential to cause significant difficulties for governments, people, and businesses. “  

At the event, he drew attention to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. However, he went further, pointing to regional flashpoints all over the world and to other emerging issues that are causing challenges. 

“There have been six, seven coups across the Sahara. Look at artificial intelligence, climate change, inequalities. It's pretty grim. And all of us are trying to find ways of thinking our way through this,” Campbell said.

Stewart, who also teaches politics and international relations as a fellow at Yale University, sought to put an academic construct behind the increasing geopolitical tensions across the globe.

“Everything that happened after the Second World War was based initially on relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which evolves, through the Cold War, into a kind of global order. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed from the ‘90s onwards, there was, for about 15 years, a clear US dominated order,” he said.

Stewart added: “From 1989 to 2005, the number of democracies in the world doubled, There's been a huge explosion in the development of free liberal market economies. It was a time where every year the world was getting more peaceful, more stable. Fewer people were living in poverty, there were fewer refugees, and then something turned.” 

Stewart said that the world has become increasingly chaotic and unpredictable with changes taking place around 2014. “From that moment onwards, the number of democracies in the world has begun to drop. The number of people in poverty in Sub Saharan Africa has risen pretty steeply. And every year since 2014, the number of refugees has increased, the number of internally displaced people has increased, the number of wars has increased and this is, in a way, something that we're still struggling to deal with.”

According to both Campbell and Stewart, the increasing geopolitical uncertainty has the potential to cause significant problems for companies, and by definition, their boards. 

“The conversation for boards now is quite different from the conversation that they would have been having in the 1990s. In the 1990s, the world was becoming more globalised, more uniform, more simple. You remember, people were talking about the end of history. The idea was basically the entire world was going to become more like Sweden,” according to Stewart. 

Campbell pointed to the United Nations as an example of the changing world structure. “The United Nations is just the collection of all the countries of the world. And the reason the United Nations appears dysfunctional, is because right now, the world seems dysfunctional,” he said. 

In the past, when most countries were signing up to multinational trade frameworks and alliances, business became “surprisingly non-political”, according to Stewart, who said that has now changed. 

“When I was talking to companies in the mid-2000s, or 2010 onwards, people would get me in to talk about Afghanistan or Iraq. And the sort of things we were talking about in the late 2010s, the sort of threats that we were worried about - Russia invading Crimea, pandemics. Again, it would have seemed pretty irrelevant to people. And suddenly, of course, that's changed.” 

He added: “Covid had the most astonishingly dramatic impact on people's bottom line. Russia's invasion of Ukraine totally transformed energy and prices across Europe very, very quickly.” According to Stewart, “geopolitics is now absolutely essential to boards and what you need to think about in terms of the consumer on the street”.

Alastair Campbell said that most boards had been talking for the last decade about climate, and how their businesses could navigate the issue. However, he said that it was crucial to start talking about other looming issues that could potentially have massive impacts over the coming decade. “You constantly need to look forward,” he said.

According to Stewart, one of those issues is artificial intelligence. “AI is something that we're not yet fully beginning to process. In a whole series of ways, all of you will be worrying in your companies about cybersecurity. But AI completely transforms the nature of the threat in cybersecurity,” he said. 

“In the past, you would be able to mount a few dozen attacks in a matter of minutes, you can suddenly mount a few million.”

Stewart added that AI also raises questions about future pandemics: “Synthetic biology means that it will now be possible for people without spending nine years with advanced degrees in biochemistry to create viruses. And it's not very difficult to imagine a world in which AI can facilitate the bringing together of Covid and Ebola.”

In relation to the boardroom, Stewart said that AI and ChatGPT would also lead to significant changes in the day-to-day operations of many companies; if people are not spending time playing with Large Language Models, they are making a mistake, he said.

“You really need to understand intimately the power of these Large Language Models. And the first thing you will notice is that for all your companies, call centres are basically finished. And that is a big, big result in terms of your bottom line,” he said. 

“The amount of time it takes to programme software has decreased by 90 per cent. That makes an incredible difference either to the number of software programmers you want to employ, or the amount of software programming you want to do with the existing programmes that you retain.”

At the event, Rory Stewart disclosed that he had been approached about chairing a board that very day. He was told that the current chair did the job three days a month, but it was felt he could do it two days a month, perhaps less. For Stewart, that is a worrying development as effective chairs need to dedicate the right amount of time.

He added that the time commitments required made it very hard for younger people at an earlier stage of their career to take board appointments. 

“If you're a successful young person really making your career and you're any good, you're working 80 hours a week, and it's pretty difficult to find the time to really serve on the board,” he said, adding that it was also a danger if a person had overcommitted to too many board memberships.

“The central role of a board is to select the chief executive and find the chief executive. And that really seems to be where the rubber hits the road. To be able to do that with any degree of confidence, you really need to understand the organisation. And to understand an organisation, you need time,” he said.

Alastair Campbell admitted that his experience of boards was often quite frustrating because he was never sure why he was there - and that the skill set he possessed was not the one that was often being utilised. 

“In some boards - and I never stayed on them long - I think I'm there because they believe I know a bit about government, a bit about media, and they often think that it is handy to have someone from the left on the board,” he said. 

However, he joked that the one thing he really enjoys about boards is trying to work out who had actually read the board papers.

“I’m usually quite good at getting some really detailed forensic questions about one of them. And the other thing is age. I'm absolutely convinced that we have to inject more young people into every aspect of our lives, particularly politics, actually. But I think boards as well.”

All told, an insightful and engaging event which should give board members pause for thought across a range of issues.