Power, By Any Other Name

To understand operational Darwinism in business, it helps to start with geopolitics—because different expressions of power (or lack thereof) are most obvious there.

Asymmetric Disruption Versus Structural Power

Take the recent volatility in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran can create real disruption through asymmetric warfare (threatening shipping, harassing vessels, projecting risk) all at relatively low cost. That disruption creates turbulence in oil prices, insurance and global shipping.

But structural power still lies elsewhere. The United States retains extraordinary control over core variables: military dominance, defense capability, economic reach, alliance networks. The U.S. is the one that ultimately decides when to escalate, when to pause and when to open or close channels for negotiation.

Note that this is an objective operational assessment, not a moral judgment or strategic evaluation. Power resides in the ability to choose when and how to engage, not just in the capacity to cause damage. In business terms, it’s the difference between owning optionality and being reduced to reaction.

Projecting Versus Executing Power

For much of the last two decades, U.S. policy in the Middle East has appeared reactive: interventions against ISIS, incursions around Syria and Libya, the Afghanistan withdrawal. Recent actions suggest the current administration favors more assertive execution—staking a position and accepting that history will be the judge.

Whether a particular decision is strategically sound is always up for debate; what matters for our purposes is the willingness to seize the decision and execute rather than letting circumstances dictate the reaction and then scrambling.

That distinction—between projecting capability and actually using it—has a direct equivalence in how companies talk about transformation versus how they actually operate.

Where Geopolitics And Value Chain Meet

In an interconnected world, geopolitics and value chains are fused. Tariffs, sanctions and regulatory shocks impact (and disrupt) production networks in near-real time.

A leader might announce sweeping economic or trade measures, with geopolitical rationales, only to discover that the economic and supply‑chain consequences are more severe and immediate than anticipated. They then have to reverse or soften course to avoid unintended damage. It’s tempting to dismiss this as waffling or incompetence. But if you look more closely, you’ll see something else: Even when heads of state, trade officials and Fortune 100 CEOs are “in the room,” nobody truly sees all the dependencies. The underlying problem is not strategy but visibility.

We see the problems caused by a lack of visibility across every industry. Take a pharmaceutical firm: They may know that their antibiotics are manufactured in India but not that critical ingredients come primarily from a specific region in China. Or consider a small supplier in Ukraine that goes temporarily offline, and a German OEM discovers that a seemingly minor raw material is, in fact, a single point of failure—leading to an immediate and intractable production backlog for a major multinational automotive company.

Geopolitical upheaval directly impacts value chains. Value chains, in turn, constrain what is politically and economically feasible. And when you lack visibility several tiers down, you are effectively navigating in the dark, whether you’re a chancellor or a CEO.

From Visibility To Adaptability

Let’s be blunt: If you don’t have visibility, you’re stuck in a purely reactive mode. In that state, you cannot truly create resilience; everything becomes a game of chance, where you’re constantly being blindsided in an environment you don’t control.

But once you do have visibility, you can then wield adaptability. In this context, when we talk about adaptability, we’re really talking about the courage to act in service of a higher level of resolve: the ability to withstand disruption, respond to it and expand capacity despite the usual constraints—limited work hours, finite machine uptime, constraints on materials or having to operate in regions where you have to lean on trusted partners amid shaky ground. That’s all part of your capacity for resolve: stretching capabilities and pushing into new domains of control, no matter what complicating factors exist.

You can do that most effectively if you’re aligned with your partners—jurisdictionally, in terms of risk and exposure, and ideologically, in terms of shared incentives. You need to know who will actually stand with you in a time of need.

An Inflection Point In Leadership

Today’s boards and shareholders are no longer satisfied with descriptive updates. They are demanding proactive positioning, shifting from “What is happening out there?” to “What are we doing about it?”

We’ve seen this in sustainability. A few years ago, the conversation centered on Scope 3 emissions and long‑range ESG commitments. Recently, a more fundamental question has pushed its way to the front: “Are we a viable, resilient business in the first place?”

If the underlying business cannot withstand shocks, it cannot fund or sustain any broader ambitions. Resilience—understood here as deep, working control over your value chain—has become the critical factor.

From there, the path forward comes down to three concrete calls to action:

1. Look deeper into your value chain.

Aim for at least three to four tiers of visibility. It’s not enough to know your direct suppliers; you must understand who supplies them, at each stage, so that you can see where real concentration and any fragility lie.

2. Classify your partners honestly.

Be clear about who is a fellow on the journey, who is a partner in creating value and who is purely transactional. Note that these are three distinct categories. This clarity is nonnegotiable if you want to act with intent rather than react to shocks. In crises, it matters who is willing and able to stretch with you versus who will simply shift to protect their own position.

3. Know what you can change, and how fast.

Map what is within your control, how you can change it if needed and what your real lead times are. This includes your degree of accountability to regulators and any external parties embedded in your design and manufacturing. Ultimately, you must ask: What can I change? How can I change it? And how quickly can I execute that change?

Only with complete visibility can you then create a realistic, adaptive operating strategy.

Operational Darwinism In Practice

So, what does operational Darwinism look like in action?

One dimension is inside‑out reinvention: rethinking what you offer, how you offer it and how deeply you embed yourself in the value chain. Nokia’s repeated reinventions—from consumer devices to network and infrastructure provider—make for an excellent case study. For them, abandoning a familiar B2C identity, rebuilding around networks and aligning the organization with a new technological order enabled the company’s survival.

The other dimension is outside‑in adaptation: deciding how you respond to the technological, economic or geopolitical dynamics around you.

• When do you fight the current, accepting short‑term pain to preserve strategic autonomy?

• When do you ride it, leveraging regulatory or geopolitical momentum in your favor?

• When do you redirect it, using your own decisions to reshape the flow of demand, capacity and risk?

Operational Darwinism is a discipline of deliberate design and relentless execution. You choose where you will play, what you will control and how fast you will move. Then you align your partners, re‑engineer your value chain and embed resilience directly into the way you operate.

Power accrues to those who act with intent, claim their ground and move before the system settles around them. They do not wait for the environment to present a clean set of options; they use the environment as it is and bend it toward their advantage.

There’s a famous Turkish saying: “Akıllı köprü arayana kadar deli suyu geçer”—while the clever one looks for a bridge, the madman has already crossed the river. In a volatile, multipolar world, the leaders who cross first, even on imperfect footing, will define the routes that others are forced to follow.

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