For years, the modern leader was expected to travel light. Not just physically, but philosophically. Borders were friction. The place was incidental. Home was wherever the Wi-Fi was strongest and the airport lounge most forgiving.
The ideal executive was a global citizen: polished, portable, and largely untroubled by where things were actually made, governed or contested. Geography, we were assured, had lost its grip. The truth is, it hadn’t. It was just waiting.
The past few years have been an extended reminder that borders don’t disappear; they merely sleep. What did we see? Well, supply chains snapped, politics intruded, migration hardened. Energy, food, data and chips became strategic assets rather than commodities. And suddenly, leaders who had spent two decades optimising for a borderless world found themselves grappling with permits, tariffs, sanctions and voters—as energy contracts, trade routes and sourcing decisions were abruptly reclassified as political acts.
This isn’t the end of globalisation. But it is the end of the fantasy that you can float above place.
Fluent in place
Take supply chains. For a generation, efficiency was king. Distance was something to be engineered away through cost, code and contracts. Then came a virus, a war, a ship stuck sideways in the Suez Canal. Just-in-time became just-too-late. The response has been telling: near-shoring, friend-shoring, redundancy over elegance. These aren’t temporary fixes. They’re structural admissions that proximity, trust and alignment matter again.
Or look at geopolitics. Trade used to be framed as neutral. It isn’t anymore. Governments now intervene openly in markets they once promised to leave alone. Strategic autonomy is no longer a fringe idea; it’s policy. Leaders who insisted politics was someone else’s problem are discovering that politics has a habit of knocking anyway.
Then there’s talent. For years, we spoke as if the best people would simply go where the work was. In practice, visas tighten, housing strains, electorates revolt and social contracts reassert themselves. Talent may be global in theory. Permission is not.
What’s collapsing here is not openness, but weightlessness. The next advantage belongs to those who are fluent in place. And that fluency is not sentimental, it’s practical. It starts with economic literacy: understanding how a region actually functions—its labour markets, infrastructure limits, regulatory instincts and informal rules—rather than treating it as a dot on a slide. Organisations that thrive now don’t just ‘enter markets’; they embed themselves.
It also requires cultural credibility. Not the thin localisation of slogans and symbols, but legitimacy. Who trusts you? Who believes you’ll stay when conditions tighten? In a more suspicious world, credibility is earned locally and lost quickly.
And it demands political awareness. Not partisanship, but realism. Knowing where sensitivities lie, which narratives resonate and which red lines should not be crossed. Leaders who claim to be “above politics” increasingly find themselves governed by it anyway.
Maps still matter
There’s a personal reinvention story here too. Careers built on perpetual motion—the next posting, the next country, the next temporary base—are being reassessed. Depth is regaining value. Knowing one system well may matter more than skimming ten lightly. Place, once dismissed as a constraint, is returning as a source of leverage.
None of this points towards retreat or nostalgia. The future is not nationalist isolation, nor a romantic return to closed borders. It’s something harder: grounded globalism. International in outlook, but local in consequence. Connected, yet accountable. The uncomfortable truth is that the ‘global citizen’ was always a privilege masquerading as inevitability. It worked brilliantly for some—until the world reminded us that maps still matter.
The leaders who stay relevant won’t be the most cosmopolitan on paper. They’ll be the ones who know where they stand—literally—and understand why that now makes all the difference. In the next phase of global business, relevance won’t come from hovering above the world, but from being rooted firmly within it.
Photo: Dreamstime.
