The Business Engineer's Geopolitical Guide
Over the past five years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying the geopolitical context we live in.
What compelled me to do this was something I noticed during the pandemic. There was a strange pattern I couldn’t immediately explain, but it signaled that something fundamental was breaking. The hyper-globalized world we had come to rely on no longer seemed sustainable, even if the reasons were not yet obvious.
At first, this was just a hunch. But the deeper I went, the more recurring patterns emerged. They were unsettling if you couldn’t make sense of them, yet surprisingly self-evident once you began to understand the logic of the new, emerging order.
From there, I started mapping what I think of as the “geopolitical map of our time”, not just where we are, but where we’re heading. I’ve always been passionate about history, but this was different.
It was an attempt to understand modern reality as it unfolds: what it actually means to live in today’s world, the physical substrate beneath the digital economy we work in, what truly enabled it, and what the implications are if we want that world to continue to exist.
I ultimately put all of this together and, personally, I bet both my professional and personal life on these conclusions. I’m not suggesting anyone else should do the same. But I do believe that leveraging some of the insights in this guide can help you make better, more informed decisions, decisions that may, hopefully, have a positive impact on your life.
You cannot understand business strategy, technology development, or institutional design without first understanding the geopolitical architecture that constrains what’s possible.
Institutions don’t form in a vacuum.
The shape of geopolitics, the configuration of spheres of influence, the security hierarchy, and the intensity of external pressure fundamentally determine what institutional structures are even possible internally.
This guide provides the analytical framework for understanding how these layers interact, from spheres of influence to alliance structures to economic asymmetries to technology stacks to institutional configurations.
Whether you’re building companies, or deploying capital, you operate within constraints that this guide makes visible.
