Witold Henisz

Henisz studies how politics hits your P&L. Not just elections and headlines, but tariffs, sanctions, great-power rivalry, stalled permits, and local grievances that shape sourcing, pricing, hiring, and reputation. Companies map the outside world into customers, suppliers, and regulators. But people in those roles see themselves first as members of a neighborhood, a trade, or a town, and they have organized along those lines since long before the company arrived. What sets people against a project is almost never the size of the check a company brings. It is how the benefits are split: who gets the jobs and the contracts, and who lives with the dust and the water table. Get that split wrong and a company becomes a target instead of a welcome guest.

He learned that lesson in Argentina. He was studying how contracts and regulators protect an investment, but the people he interviewed kept telling him he was asking the wrong question. Then the pots started banging in the street, and his interviews turned into conversations about which fights were still running. One of his interviewees pointed up the road that leads to the presidential palace and told him what happens when five thousand people march down it. The contract no longer matters. Neither does the regulator. The whole job, Henisz was told, is making sure they never assemble, long before anyone needs a flight plan.

Most political analysis stops at the read: here is what is happening, and here is what may happen next. Henisz is a political analyst and a business school professor in the same person, so the read is where he starts. He translates political events into consequences for a company’s costs, markets, investments, and strategies. Audiences leave with a lens rather than a briefing.

In a study of 26 gold mines, financial markets were discounting the gold these firms controlled by 72 percent. Henisz showed that accounting for their relationships with governments and communities cut that discount by more than half. Stronger relationships made projects more likely to stay on schedule and on budget, and let companies capture more of what their assets were worth. The same work cuts the other way and turns up opportunity. When a crude country-risk score rules out an attractive market, Henisz shows a company its real exposure, its relationships, and what it can manage. A market the company had written off comes back into play.

Henisz created a political risk index used by thousands of scholars worldwide. With the people who run EY’s geostrategy practice, he co-authored a guide on integrating political risk into corporate strategy and decision-making. Companies, asset managers, and development institutions hire him to do this work, and he worked earlier at the International Monetary Fund. He is Vice Dean and Faculty Director of Wharton’s Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative, where he examines which political-risk and sustainability investments create value, and which do not. He has received seven Wharton teaching awards in eight years. He opens a session by asking the room how much time it wants to spend with government officials, hears the usual answer of zero, then shows what that answer costs.

WHY AUDIENCES WILL BE BETTER OFF

• Audiences walk out able to name the political risks that can reach their costs and growth this year, and to say who has to act before risk becomes loss.
• Attendees leave able to challenge a country-risk score that is quietly closing off markets worth having.
• Planning teams leave able to say where their current strategy breaks across the futures that are actually plausible, and what to shore up first.
• Project teams leave knowing the people who can speed up or stall their next investment, and fund those relationships now rather than lawyers later.
• Companies and investors leave able to tell the sustainability work that protects or creates value from the work that only checks a box.