Let’s Find the Puzzle Piece We Need: “The Geopolitical Puzzle” is On-Air.
A new podcast about Geopolitics.
Since I was a kid, I loved geography and reading maps; I was always interested in topics about countries, currencies, flags, languages, and diplomacy.
When I took some courses at Yale School of Management about sustainability, ESG, climate change, Scope1,2 and 3, I thought about the impacts, risks, challenges, and opportunities in companies and how this affects countries, regions, and continents.
What we all went through, the Covid issue and seeing how this impacted day-to-day businesses due to its effect on supply chains, made me think that we are very interconnected and depend on many things.
At the Corporate Climate Change Risk Management course at Yale School of Management, we were told for our assignments that we could choose to analyze for the length of the course the company where we worked, an industry we knew well, or a company of interest to us.
I chose a large logistics company from Denmark; you already know the company. A hint: it has enormous vessels.
When I studied this company, I understood its commitment to reducing its carbon footprint and focusing on ESG metrics, sustainability plans, new fuels, green technology, and risks. Its operations worldwide, in each port, and having many stakeholders convinced me its role in geopolitics was crucial.
In addition to this, I became much more interested in the current geopolitics topic of everything that is happening in Ukraine, and its effects on the whole world, the refugees in Italy and the UK, the immigrants at the United States border, the Venezuelan immigrants in South America who are fleeing the communist, dictatorial and evil regime of Nicolas Maduro and how this situation affects neighboring countries economically, the tension in the Middle East region, conflicts in Tigray, the role of Africa in this new world, the often tense situations in regarding energy and oil in the Gulf countries, Israel, etc. Everything is related and affects the world as a whole.
Additionally, I am reading a good book, “Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity,” written by Amy Zegart and one of my favorite leaders of American politics: Condoleezza Rice.
The book explains the geopolitical risks and threats that, believe it or not, range from a simple tweet to a war. I recommend it.
Since I produce a podcast focusing on corporate and ESG, I decided to produce a new one with monthly episodes focused on geopolitics, international affairs issues, and everything this implies.
An internationalist wrote me an email and told me: Juan-Carlos, you will cover EVERYTHING with this topic about geopolitics. That makes me feel that I was on the right path.
The name of this new podcast is The Geopolitical Puzzle: a bilingual podcast (Spanish-English) featuring interviews with leaders involved in international affairs issues that impact different world regions.
The Geopolitical Puzzle is On-Air and already has the first episode — it will be published monthly, and by season, this first season will have five episodes.
My first guest is Shannon K. O’Neil, Vice President, Deputy Director of Studies, and Nelson and David Rockefeller, Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
We discussed the opportunities of Latin America in times of regionalization and geopolitics; we also highlighted exciting points from her book “The Globalization Myth. Why Regions Matter”.
There will be new episodes related to refugees, oil, conflicts, and other critical issues that experts and specialists worldwide will share in the following episodes.
Juan-Carlos Giraldo. Communication Strategist Specialist. Boston.
