UK Budget: What Can Leaders Learn About Confidence and Signals?

Today, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver a Budget that has already been judged harshly. The cycle of private briefings, leaks, commentary and internal counter-briefings has created an environment where confidence has eroded before she reaches the Dispatch Box. The Government now finds itself in a no-win situation, not because of policy alone but because of perception.

Most people knew the fiscal picture was difficult. Any government would have inherited a challenging economic landscape. But the way today’s Budget has been communicated has highlighted a deeper issue: a lack of narrative clarity, strategic message discipline and meaningful stakeholder engagement. Markets, businesses and investors respond not only to what governments do, but how they talk about what they do.

Confidence is shaped by perception, trust and reputation. When communication becomes fragmented or overly tactical, stakeholders assume the worst. This is even more pronounced during periods of political uncertainty, geopolitical fragmentation and economic volatility. Strategic communication is not a PR exercise. It is a core tool of governance, economic stability and value creation.

From my work with governments, technology companies, venture investors and family offices across Europe and Asia, it is clear that organisations with strong message discipline and stakeholder engagement outperform those without it. They understand that communications must be rooted in behavioural economics, which blends psychology and economics to explain real-world decisions. Failing to consider how people interpret signals leaves risks exposed.

The UK’s recent communication approach has already contributed to uncertainty in markets. Investors are unsure about fiscal direction, the degree of ministerial alignment and the Government’s ability to deliver. This is not about politics; it is about consistency, preparedness and trust.

Why Perception Shapes Capital Flows

Investors operate in an environment of incomplete information. They fill the gaps with signals.

In stable environments, those signals come from policy frameworks, delivery records and consistent communication. In uncertain environments, messages and perception become even more critical. Research from the Bank for International Settlements shows that policy uncertainty directly increases the cost of capital and reduces cross-border investment flows.

Similarly, the IMF has shown that when investors lack confidence in the coherence or credibility of government communication, markets overreact to fiscal news, creating volatility that damages growth.

https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/wp/2022/english/wpiea2022036-print-pdf.pdf

For companies, perception and reputation function as intangible assets that influence valuation, partnerships and investor confidence. When perception diverges from reality, value leaks.

Why Message Discipline Matters

Message discipline is not about robotic communication. It reduces risk by creating clarity and alignment. It establishes a destination, explains choices and sets expectations transparently.

Effective message discipline provides:

• Consistency: Markets interpret inconsistency as uncertainty, which raises perceived risk. When ministers contradict each other, or when business leaders communicate in different directions, investors price in this instability.

• Credibility: A leader who maintains a clear, evidence-based narrative builds credibility over time. Like interest, credibility compounds, especially when stakeholders see that communication reflects real strategic decisions.

• Predictability: Predictability lowers risk premiums. Investors do not need guarantees, but they do need stability in how leaders think and communicate. This is not about guaranteeing outcomes. It is about setting expectations.

• Confidence and Stability: Disciplined communication reduces market overreaction and reassures long-term investors that leadership is in control.

Government Lessons: The UK as a Case Study

The 2022 Mini-Budget: A Failure of Signalling

The 2022 Mini-Budget under Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng offers the clearest recent example of how poor communication can destabilise markets.

Problems included:

• No OBR forecast

• Aggressive but unaligned ministerial briefings

• No private preparation with global investors or bond markets

• Messaging that contradicted Bank of England strategy

The consequences were immediate: sterling collapsed, gilt yields surged, mortgage markets froze, and UK credibility suffered. This was a reputational crisis, not just an economic one.

Today’s Budget: Confidence Still Fragile

Despite a different government and a more grounded economic context, the upcoming UK Budget is suffering from similar issues:

• Unclear fiscal messaging over recent weeks

• Conflicting briefings on spending cuts vs stimulus

• Lack of visibility for investors on tax stability

• A perception that key departments are not aligned

• Limited private engagement with global investors or sovereign wealth funds

This is not about political preference. It is about execution.

Confidence matters more than ever. Debt servicing costs remain high, productivity flat, and the UK faces fierce competition from the US, EU and Asia for investment in AI, science, infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.

At the same time, the UK continues to lose homegrown intellectual property as founders relocate or sell early due to perceived policy instability and limited domestic investment incentives. Attracting international investment is important, but neglecting domestic capital formation creates long-term structural risk.

How Investors Read Signals: Why Perception Shapes Capital Decisions

Why Investors Care More Than Ever

Capital does not follow performance alone; it follows conviction. Venture investors, corporate venture capital (CVC) units and family offices increasingly base decisions on the signals leaders send through their narrative, communication discipline and situational awareness. In a world defined by geopolitical shocks and macroeconomic complexity, perception has become a proxy for governance quality and long-term resilience.

Venture Capital and CVC: Narrative Guides Capital Allocation

In venture and CVC, narrative discipline influences capital allocation long before a term sheet appears. Investors look for clarity about a company’s purpose, strategy and understanding of the geopolitical and regulatory landscape. The most effective funds invest heavily in communicating their investment thesis, technology roadmap and approach to risk. Narrative amplifies fundamentals and helps investors understand why leadership deserves confidence.

Deal flow is shaped by perception. Founders gravitate toward funds that demonstrate consistency, clarity and discipline. When messaging is promotional, reactive or contradictory, founders interpret it as a sign of weak internal culture or unpredictable decision-making.

Government relationships operate similarly. Agencies expect venture investors and CVCs to explain how their thesis aligns with national priorities such as AI, life sciences, digital infrastructure or advanced manufacturing. Clear articulation opens doors. Vagueness closes them.

International expansion also depends on message discipline. New markets welcome investors who signal governance maturity and long-term intent. Misaligned or shifting messages slow down partnerships, regulatory acceptance and capital deployment.

Institutional investors now expect portfolio companies to communicate with the same discipline. A founder who cannot articulate governance, geopolitical considerations or market strategy faces valuation pressure later.

Family Offices: Quiet but Highly Sensitive to Message Quality

Single-family offices take a different but equally sensitive approach. Their decisions are shaped by relationships, judgment and long-term perspective rather than formal processes. They value leaders who articulate strategy calmly, clearly and consistently.

Inconsistent communication signals deeper problems. Family offices interpret conflicting messages, promotional narratives or reactive communication as signs of weak governance or poor internal alignment. Those who have navigated multiple cycles are especially sensitive to these signals and avoid organisations that communicate ahead of delivery.

Across my work with family offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Europe, the pattern is clear: disciplined communication is one of the strongest indicators of investment-worthy leadership. When it is present, trust forms quickly. When it is absent, opportunities disappear.

The Real Cost of Poor Signalling for Governments and Companies

Weak communication creates material, financial, and strategic consequences. When leaders fail to communicate clearly, markets raise borrowing costs and price in additional risk. Volatility increases as investors struggle to interpret intent, reducing overall market confidence.

Poor signalling also damages foreign direct investment, with capital shifting toward more predictable jurisdictions. Partnerships stall when corporates and governments perceive misalignment. Top talent becomes harder to attract because high-calibre individuals prefer stable, strategically coherent environments.

Reputational damage lingers long after fundamentals improve. When leaders fail to manage perception, markets manage it for them.

Five Recommendations for Leaders

1. Build a Strategic Narrative Before You Communicate

Communications should not be reactive. A clear narrative grounded in strategy, evidence and long-term intent prevents communication from becoming reactive or superficial.

• Define what you are trying to achieve.

• Explain why it matters now.

• Set out how you will deliver it.

• Be honest about trade-offs.

• Establish how progress will be measured.

Without this foundation, messaging becomes tactical noise.

2. Align Internally Before Communicating Externally

Credibility depends on internal coordination, especially ahead of major moments that influence markets and partners.

• Ensure Ministers, executives and teams are briefed in a coordinated way.

• Prepare alignment ahead of budgets, capital markets days and fundraising.

• Synchronise messaging during M&A processes and regulatory decisions.

Investors reward alignment.

3. Use Private Engagement to Shape Market Understanding

Engaging investors, analysts and strategic partners privately helps set expectations and strengthen trust without disclosing sensitive information.

• Clarify intent with key stakeholders.

• Stress-test narrative coherence.

• Manage expectations proactively.

• Build relationships that support you during volatility.

Governments, in particular and in my experience, underuse this channel.

4. Anticipate Geopolitical and Macro-economic Interpretation

Every announcement is interpreted within a global system of geopolitical competition, regulation and economic pressure.

• Recognise how signals interact with US-China dynamics.

• Understand EU regulatory expectations.

• Consider Asian investment flows and regional sensitivities.

• Build geopolitical literacy into message planning

Today, and especially for governments, international business and investors, message discipline requires geopolitical literacy.

5. Maintain Consistency Over Time

Confidence builds when leaders communicate coherently over the long term, not through occasional set-piece moments.

• Treat consistency as a cultural norm, not a campaign tactic.

• Ensure messaging reflects delivery and strategic direction.

• Avoid contradictions between different parts of the organisation.

Disciplined communication must be embedded into leadership culture.

The Strategic Benefits of Strong Message Discipline

When governments and companies communicate clearly, risk perception declines, valuations improve, and market confidence stabilises. Disciplined communication also reinforces geopolitical positioning, signalling reliability to international investors and partners.

Stakeholders trust leaders whose words match their actions. Confidence is not sold; it is earned through clarity, discipline and sustained engagement.

Confidence is not sold. It is earned through clarity, discipline and engagement.

Why Message Discipline Shapes Investment Confidence, Valuation and Credibility

In a world defined by geopolitical shocks and rapid technological change, disciplined communication is no longer optional. It is a core requirement of leadership. Governments that mismanage perception face rising borrowing costs and declining policy credibility. Companies that allow communications to drift lose investor trust and strategic momentum.

With today’s Budget, the UK has an opportunity to demonstrate how aligned, predictable communication can rebuild confidence at home and abroad. CEOs, boards, investors and family offices face the same expectation: communicate clearly or allow others to define your narrative.

Leaders who apply message discipline will secure investment, partnerships and talent more effectively. Those who do not will see markets, stakeholders and competitors shape their story for them.

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For organisations looking to strengthen their narrative, build message discipline or shape stakeholder engagement across the UK, Europe, Asia or the global investment community, I would be pleased to discuss how my experience can support you.

Why Reputation Risks Rise in the Age of Creators

For decades, corporate and government communications relied on a stable, if sometimes adversarial, relationship with established media. Reputation management strategies, crisis playbooks, and legal protections were designed for this world, a world with editorial gatekeepers, predictable news cycles, and a shared, if often contested, understanding of journalistic standards.

That world is rapidly receding. In fact, it has been changing for the last 10-15 years. A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 'Mapping News Creators and Influencers in Social and Video Networks,' provides the data to confirm what many of us in advisory and reputation management have observed: the landscape of public information has fundamentally changed, with many organisations not having adapted their public and private communications processes to manage better how they are perceived.

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The report, which analyses data from 24 countries, reveals that news creators and influencers operating in social and video networks have become a ‘significant source of news in recent years,’ often eclipsing traditional news brands in terms of attention. This shift presents a profound challenge to the traditional reputational guardrails of governments and companies. The old playbooks that boards, C-suites, Chiefs of Staff or Political Advisors know are no longer sufficient.

The New Influential: How Creators Reshape Public Debate

The Reuters Institute report is not merely about celebrities posting lifestyle content. It identifies a diverse and robust ecosystem of individuals who command massive audiences and directly influence public opinion on politics, current affairs, and civic issues.

The report defines ‘news creators’ as ‘individuals (or sometimes small groups of individuals) who create and distribute content primarily through social and video networks and have some impact on public debates around news and current affairs,’ noting they are ‘independent from wider news institutions for at least some of their news output.'

Their influence is not a niche phenomenon. The report finds that across a set of markets, including Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States (as well as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa), news creators are having a very significant impact. In most of these markets, people say they pay more attention to creators and influencers than to mainstream news brands on social media.

The report helps us understand the different kinds of challenges and opportunities these creators represent:

1. Commentary: This is the most frequently mentioned category, dominated by often partisan, mostly male online political talk show hosts like Tucker Carlson (USA) and Joe Rogan (USA). The report notes this commentary is ‘unconstrained by regulation or norms around impartiality that may exist for television and radio.'And the issue is that, while they are based in the USA, their views and opinions reach international markets, many of which use English as a core language. In effect, they reach and influence without any control, regardless of their views being verifiable.

2. Explanation: Creators like France’s HugoDécrypte (Hugo Travers) have millions of followers by explaining complex news topics in simple, accessible ways for younger consumers. The report states that ‘this category of creators is taking attention away from traditional media, which often struggle to connect with younger audiences.'

3. Specialism: Individuals like football transfer reporter Fabrizio Romano or former journalist Taylor Lorenz build powerful niche communities, often going deeper on a subject than traditional media can.

4. News & Investigation: While less common due to resource constraints, some creators and citizen journalists break news or conduct investigations on matters of public interest, such as Palestinians reporting from Gaza or citizen journalists in Kenya documenting police brutality.

Perhaps most critically for reputation managers, the report also details a vast 'news-adjacent' sphere of satirists, infotainment podcasters, gamers, and lifestyle influencers who, due to their massive audiences and built-up trust, can be drawn into political and cultural debates with significant impact.

The Core Challenge for Reputation Management

Traditional communications systems are built for accuracy and accountability, while social platforms reward speed and emotional engagement. As the Reuters Institute notes, creators ‘have been more adept than media companies in moulding their storytelling and tone to the requirements of social platforms,’ particularly among Gen Z and millennial audiences.

The implications are strategic. Younger audiences no longer go directly to official sources; they are influenced by intermediaries who reframe and reinterpret information through personal narratives. As algorithms amplify sensational content, reputational risk multiplies: a single influencer clip can drive a global perception shift overnight. This new dynamic demands that both governments and corporate leaders rethink how they build, protect, and sustain public trust.

The fact is that the rise of the creator economy that we’ve been living through for a good number of years has created three fundamental problems for communications and those working and advising in reputation management.

The Velocity of Reputational

The report highlights that creators are ‘extremely responsive to ever-shifting audience preferences and behaviours.’ Their content is optimised for speed and engagement, not for fact-checking or legal review. A claim made by a prominent creator can achieve viral scale in hours, sometimes minutes, far outpacing the internal response mechanisms of most large organisations. While a company might prepare a statement over several hours, the narrative is already set and cemented in the minds of millions.

The Erosion of Guardrails

Our established systems are built for a different media environment. Issuing a press release, requesting a correction from a news outlet, or leveraging legal frameworks for defamation are processes designed for entities that have structures, assets, and a recognised set of rules.

As the report makes clear, many top creators are independent operators. They are ‘independent from wider news institutions’, meaning they lack the traditional editorial oversight and legal cover that act as a buffer and a point of contact for corporations and governments.

The report notes that ‘many of the biggest names in political commentary... used to work as journalists but are now highly critical of the mainstream media. They relish the freedom to express their true opinions.’ This freedom often comes without the traditional journalistic guardrails, making them potent and unpredictable actors.

The Algorithmic Amplification of Sensationalism

The platforms where these creators thrive are designed to maximise engagement. The Reuters Institute report explicitly states that 'algorithmically driven platforms are pushing both creators and audiences towards more sensational and partisan approaches.’

Content that is emotionally charged, polarising, or controversial travels further and faster than nuanced, balanced reporting. This creates an inherent incentive structure that can reward the rapid dissemination of mis- and disinformation, which poses a direct threat to corporate and governmental reputations.

The report finds that 'online influencers may be attracting more attention but at least some of their content is considered unreliable by audiences..., with well-documented cases of false or misleading information around subjects such as politics, health, and climate change raising important questions about what this might mean for our democracies.’

The Demographic Shift: Reaching the Audience of Tomorrow

The challenge is compounded by a stark generational divide. The audiences for these creators are disproportionately young, representing the future consumers, voters, and stakeholders for every organisation.

The data is clear: 'Under-35s who use social media are more likely to consume news from creators (48%) than from mainstream media (41%). Those 35 and over pay more attention to mainstream media (44%) than creators (35%).’

If your reputation management strategy doesn’t engage the platforms and personalities shaping this generation’s worldview, you’re not just fighting today’s fire, you’re forfeiting tomorrow’s trust. And this is a difficult position to be in, because managing reputations through media engagement and management is, generally, an exercise that, aside from the cost of PR and communications professionals and that of communications agencies, carries no direct cost. Yet influencers, and access to them, well, require a pay-to-play engagement and communications model.

A Strategic Roadmap for Businesses And Governments

Acknowledging this new reality is the first step. The next is to adapt. Here is a strategic framework for leaders and Chief Communications Officers to better protect and build their reputations in the age of news creators.

Move from Monitoring to Mapping and Engagement

Simply monitoring for brand mentions is no longer enough. Organisations must actively map their influence ecosystem.

Governments need to recognise that the content and opinions which reach and influence audiences form part of the wider information ecosystem, and are therefore an element of their geopolitical terrain. As a result, Governments should map not only their domestic media landscape but also transnational influence flows. After all, as the report shows, political ideas and influencers cross borders, especially from the U.S. into other English-speaking countries.

• Identify Key Voices: Beyond traditional journalists, identify the commentators, explainers, specialists, and even news-adjacent influencers in your sector. The most advanced organisations are creating ‘network maps’ of who influences perception in their industry, including critics, advocates, and neutral observers.

• Understand Motivations: Analyse what drives these creators. Are they motivated by building a community, promoting a specific ideology, or simply a commercial opportunity? This understanding is crucial for strategic or tactical management, not just of your reputation but also of building trust.

• Build Authentic Relationships: Proactively and authentically engage with credible creators. Offer them access to subject matter experts, provide early briefings on complex initiatives, or invite them to participate in roundtables. The goal is to become a trusted resource, not just a source for press releases.

Develop a 'Crisis Speed' Response Capability

You need to understand that the 24-hour news cycle has been replaced by the 60-minute viral cycle. This is the world that governments and companies need to acknowledge and rebuild themselves for. Your response protocols must keep pace, and to do this, you need to:

• Build trust ecosystems, not message hierarchies: Develop and pre-approve key messaging frameworks for potential crises that can be adapted and deployed within minutes and/or hours, not days. Companies can build relationships with explanatory creators, subject-matter experts, and credible commentators, not just media outlets.

• Empower Digital-First Teams: Ensure your social media and digital communications teams have the authority to respond quickly in a crisis, using authentic, platform-native language (short-form video on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram). And remember that whatever you share needs to be designed using language that engages your current stakeholders as well as audiences of influencers that are part of your own ecosystem.

• Embrace transparency as a defensive asset: In a world where ’many creators are turning themselves into mini-businesses and brands,’ audiences expect similar authenticity from companies, which is why there is a growing need to embrace and openly acknowledge uncertainty, explaining decisions, and engaging directly with sceptics can mitigate polarisation and rebuild credibility.

• Practice for a Creator-Led Crisis: Include scenarios in your crisis simulations where the trigger is a viral video from an influencer, not a newspaper investigation.

Invest in Explanatory and 'Prebuttal' Content

If explanation is a key creator strength, it should become a core competency of your communications team.

• Become Your Own Explainer: Use your owned channels to produce clear, engaging, and visual content that explains complex policies, products, or issues. Adopt the storytelling techniques that make creators successful. The report notes that media companies have the opportunity to 'copy creator storytelling techniques to make content more accessible.’

• Practice 'Prebuttal': Anticipate misinformation and proactively create content that addresses potential criticisms or false narratives before they gain traction. Feed this content to both trusted creators and your own audiences.

Rethink Legal and Regulatory Strategies

While legal action remains a tool, it is often blunt and can be ineffective against a decentralised network of creators. Instead, focus on platform partnerships and proactive transparency.

• Weigh the Streisand Effect: Legal threats can often amplify the original content, a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect. Consider this carefully before acting.

• Focus on Platforms: Invest in building relationships with platform trust and safety teams to understand their policies and reporting mechanisms for harmful misinformation.

• Promote Media Literacy: Consider supporting or partnering with organisations that promote digital and media literacy, helping the public better identify unreliable information.

Collaborate with Caution and Clear Purpose

Some news organisations are now looking to 'collaborate with creators by bringing content (labelled) into their platform.’ This is a potential model for corporations and governments, but it must be handled with care.

• Define the Terms of Engagement: Any collaboration must be transparent. Audiences should know the nature of the relationship.

• Respect Creator Authenticity: Micromanaging a creator's content can seriously backfire. The value is in their authentic voice and how they are perceived by their own community. Provide them with information and context, not a script.

• Focus on Value Exchange: Successful collaborations are based on mutual benefit. What unique access or insight can you provide that adds reputation or even indirect financial value to the creator's audience?

Reputation in the Age of the Algorithm

The Reuters Institute report highlights that 'the professional and creator worlds are converging.’ This is not a temporary trend but a permanent structural shift in the wider landscape of how people consume media and content. The 'unruly information space' is the new normal.

For leaders and Chief Communications Officers, the new environment that they must recognise is one where they can no longer rely solely on reputation management processes designed for a media environment from the 20th century. The speed, scale, and nature of the threat and opportunity presented by news creators demand a new agile playbook where companies and governments better understand their direct and indirect audiences.

This demands a shift from reactive defence to proactive engagement. It means listening to new voices, speaking on new platforms, and telling your story in ways that resonate.

By understanding the creator ecosystem and adapting with speed and intelligence, governments and companies can protect reputation and build the trust that defines their future. By understanding the creator ecosystem mapped in this report, and by adapting your strategies with speed and intelligence, you can not only protect your reputation but also build deeper, more authentic connections with the audiences that will define your future.

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Reputation has never moved faster. If you’d like to discuss how to protect and grow yours, let’s talk.

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Spain’s Rise: Innovation, Reputation, and Global Perception

Last Friday, I attended a private roundtable at the Spanish Embassy in London with Carlos Cuerpo, Spain’s Minister for Economy, Trade and Business, joined by his investment team from Madrid and London, as well as a cross-section of investors, venture capital funds, founders and advisers.

Since leaving UK Government it has been a privilege to engage with partner countries and support where that is needed, with either strategic advisory, communciations and positioning or international stakeholder engagement.

The session at The Spanish Ambasador’s Residence wasn’t just a briefing. It was an example of how a country can intentionally reposition itself and reshape its reputation, and, in doing so, build alliances, attract capital, and secure its place in the growing global innovation economy. The event was the culmination of an extended visit to London, where Cuerpo met with his UK Government counterpart Peter Kyle as well as with the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.

For too long, Spain has been viewed through a narrow lens, as a tourism-led economy known for ‘quality of life, cultural exports, and sunshine.’ Those strengths remain, but are now being leveraged to rebrand Spain and its competitive offer to the world.

The fact is that the Spain that I grew up in and see today is one that has plenty of capital. In the past, this was just not seen. Today, with a range of companies ranging from infrastructure to telecommunications and fashion, Spanish capital is seen and investing in innovation and growth opportunities. As Carlos Cuerpo made clear at the embassy, Spain is now staking its claim as a serious innovation and investment hub, rooted in economic resilience, technological ambition and international credibility.

“Despite being the most affected country by COVID,” the Minister said, “we’ve now recovered the pre-COVID trend. It’s a great sign of how dynamic the Spanish economy is.” And the data backs it up and is being used to reset the narrative from Spain being there for tourism to one where it is there for investment and growth.

Minister Carlos Cuerpo leading the meeting.

A new economic story is being written

Data shows that Spain is outpacing the EU average with growth that, in the Minister’s words, is “twice as much as the EU,” is forecasting over the coming year, with a projected IMF growth rate for 2025 of 2.9%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), October 2025 World Economic Outlook. Not bad.

According to data presented:

• Over half a million new jobs are being created annually, “more stable, higher-value jobs,” many in sectors such as advanced engineering, digital services, and life sciences.

• Labour market participation is now 30% higher than before COVID, and real wages have grown despite global inflation pressures.

• Spain is today Europe’s third-largest start-up and scale-up ecosystem, with €5.7 billion invested in 2025, up 36% year-on-year.

• 85% of Spanish tech investment rounds now involve international investors, a clear sign of market confidence and openness.

This transformation is attracting attention. In recent months, the IMF, The Financial Times, and The Economist have all pointed to Spain as a standout performer in Europe. Just last month, The Editorial Board of The Financial Times wrote an opinion piece stating that, ‘Spain has become Europe’s standout economy.’

Strategic in a multipolar world

What makes Spain’s repositioning so relevant today is the context in which it is happening.

As I’ve stated before, we are living in a growing, multipolar, reputation-driven world, where alliances are shifting, capital is mobile, and narratives are as important as numbers. Countries that can project credibility, openness, strategic clarity and can be agile and move at pace are more likely to secure investment, attract talent, and build influence. Look at Asian countries and the civil services of countries like Singapore.

Spain has understood that it is not just economic policies that matter, but also how these and the country are presented and, critically, perceived. A point that I made at the roundtable and then to the Minister.

And it’s not just reacting to global change; it is using the tools of policy, investment, and strategic communication to define its place not just in Europe, but beyond.

“We’ve grown with purpose,” Minister Cuerpo said. “That means growth that is inclusive, investment-led and stable.”

Investment: from quantity to quality

One of the clearest signals of this soft repositioning that I picked up is how Spain is attracting high-quality foreign direct investment in future-facing sectors.

At the event, Cuerpo said that, “Spain was ranked seventh globally for new investment projects between 2018 and 2024,” citing Financial Times FDI Markets data. “We were second only to the United States in attracting investment in digital and green sectors.”

This isn’t speculative capital. It’s increasingly strategic and long-term by those that are looking for international growth markets.

The Ministry’s senior adviser on investment policy shared that the Next Tech Fund has already committed €600 million this year alone, investing:

• 54% in digital transformation

• 20% in deep tech

• The remaining 26% in infrastructure, renewables, and industrial resilience

Spain’s Start-Up Law (2022), ENISA funding, and the public-private ICO Next Tech programme are all working together to professionalise the ecosystem and de-risk early-stage innovation.

This joined-up approach is building confidence, with investors around the table stating they are scaling up their efforts and investments in Spain over the next two years. The market's dynamism, transparency, and ease of investing, features not necessarily true across all EU markets, are helping to make Spain stand out.

Beyond tourism: the perception pivot

Spain’s shift is about more than policy and numbers. It is a reputational shift, which now requires a national brand evolution to reflect and amplify the confidence, capability, and ambition that is fast growing internationally.

In the past, Spain’s international perception centred on lifestyle, tourism, and cost competitiveness. Those qualities remain assets, but they are no longer the only story, especially if you also consider the innovation happening in universities and the work of their tech transfer and spin-out teams.

From Madrid to Málaga, Bilbao to Barcelona, Spain is increasingly viewed as a hub for serious business, particularly in:

• Quantum computing (Multiverse Computing)

• Life sciences (Barcelona’s Biocat and Madrid’s health clusters)

• AI and applied data science in Euskadi - The Basque Country

• Green mobility and renewable infrastructure

One investor described it as “a generational shift in mindset, Spanish founders today don’t just want to build for Spain. They want to lead in Europe and scale globally.”

Another founder said that, “Spain now produces the kind of founders we didn’t see ten years ago.” They are internationally minded, ambitious, and building for longevity.”

Years ago, when I was based in the UAE, I remember learning of the infrastructure work that Spanish construction companies like Ferrovial and others were involved in in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. I raised this as a great example with a Spanish Senior Civil Servant at the round table, of the quiet work that Spain is achieving worldwide and he agreed and said about how “Spain has been that we have been involved in rebuilding around the world.”

Soft power meets hard economics

What we are currently seeing with Spain’s transformation also challenges the artificial divide between ‘soft power’ and ‘hard policy’.

Yes, its reputation for cultural richness, social cohesion, and quality of life has long been admired. But, what’s happening now is a fusion of this soft power and strategic positioning, which makes Spain more investable.

International talent wants to live and build in places that offer safety, belonging and creativity. Investors look for ecosystems with stable governance, transparency, and alignment with international standards. Spain now offers both.

In fact, one participant put it plainly: “People used to go to Spain for the lifestyle. Now they stay because the ecosystem works.” And when you look at that lifestyle and the weather and culture, well, look at California and it’s origins and look at what Spain is building. Could it create a European model of Silicon Valley? A lot is needed, but it’s not impossible that, certainly within the EU, Spain could position itself as its European counterpart.

The role of strategic communications in national competitiveness

For me and my work at the intersection of strategy, communications and investment, Spain’s case highlights something unique: how national competitiveness is becoming increasingly reputational, and how this intangible asset needs to be leveraged correctly, to deliver growth that can support every citizen.

GDP growth is vital, but, unless that growth is experienced by a majority of citizens, well, GDP growth won’t be enough.

Governments need to translate communications into tangible experiences. It needs to communicate what makes their economy different and the experiences that they delivery. They must build stakeholder trust, offer predictability, and present a vision that investors and partners believe in.

Carlos Cuerpo’s team focused on presenting a coherent, data-driven, and quietly confident story of transformation. Yes, questions and requests were still being made privately, but these questions were noted for internal discussion.

As for where Spain is now, their framing was clear:

• Spain is open: 85% of funding rounds involve foreign investors.

• Spain is mature: It now hosts over 15 unicorns and third- and fourth-time founders.

• Spain is trusted: Its policies are seen as credible, transparent, and consistent.

What other countries can learn

Spain’s offers several lessons for nations and leaders navigating this complex geopolitical moment:

1. Narratives matter: Investment follows clarity. A country’s story must match its substance and be told with confidence and continuity.

2. Perception is a strategic asset: Reputation influences who shows up at the table, and whether they stay.

3. Soft power is not a luxury; it’s a multiplier: Spain’s culture, creativity and openness are now part of its economic proposition.

4. Build for partnerships, not just praise: Spain’s strength lies in how it brings together government, capital, universities, and corporates, and opens the door to international collaboration.

Spain’s future as a central figure in European innovation

The data doesn’t lie, and I hear that from my contacts in other markets across the GCC, Asia, and Southeast Asia. Spain is positioning itself and is being recognised as a pillar of the EU’s innovation agenda, particularly in strategic autonomy areas such as digital infrastructure, biotech, AI, and climate technology.

So, what comes next?

• Spain will need to double down on scaling late-stage ventures to turn unicorns into global market leaders.

• Continue building out its institutional capital base, including pension and sovereign fund participation in VC.

• Extend its international communications footprint, ensuring that Madrid, London, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, New York, and Tokyo all understand the depth and direction of Spain’s growth model.

Spain is no longer just an economic recovery story; it’s a reputational success story

In a fragmented, multipolar world, countries like Spain that combine strategy, narrative and trust will lead the next wave of global growth.

Yes, Spain has changed, and not just in numbers, but in how it is seen. And that, ultimately, is what will shape and enhance its influence, its investment flows, and its future.

Why Your Board's Blind Spot is Costing You Your Reputation

Earlier this week, FleishmanHillard published a report that looked at the readiness of companies to the rising number of issues and potential crises. The report, 'Leading in the Era of Compounding Crisis,' is both a warning and a wake-up call. It confirms what many of us in strategic communications and corporate advisory have suspected: modern crises do not arrive as single, neat events. They layer, amplify and feed on one another. The fact is that Boards and C-suite teams today remain organised around last-century culture and assumptions about risk, expertise, and decision-making, which increases their reputational risk and, as a result, financial risk.

The issue has two sides: what and how executives view risk and how they react to it and also what value they place on trust, reputation and perception. Because, as it stands, brand value is seen as a tactical asset rather than a strategic intangible asset.

Why FleishmanHillard’s findings matter now

FleishmanHillard’s UK study interviewed senior leaders and found a stark preparedness gap. Yes, executives perceive an expanding set of threats, from cyberattacks and supply chain shocks to geopolitical threats, disinformation, and cultural flashpoints, and consistently report that they are less ready to manage those threats than they are concerned about them.

The report highlights, for example, that leaders view cyber, supply chain, and customer-service failures as among the top risks with a significant impact on EBITDA. Yet, many do not feel ‘very prepared’ to respond. 

That same report makes two practical observations that are hard to ignore. First, crises now compound and cascade: one issue creates conditions for another. Second, internal failings, delayed decision-making, poor alignment and weak issue reporting often convert a manageable incident into a full-blown crisis. Both factors mean that a reactive, siloed approach to risk management is no longer adequate. 

The expertise gap at the boardroom table

Without a doubt, the uncomfortable truth is the structural mismatch between the skills boards have and the risks companies now face.

Traditional boardroom profiles prioritise financial, operational and legal experience. Without a doubt, that is critical, of course, but in today's world, it is not sufficient.

Independent research reveals that communications leaders are still rarely represented at the highest governance levels. For example, Spencer Stuart’s analysis notes that very few chief communications officers have directorships on large company boards. That absence matters because communications and reputation are strategic, not tactical, risks.

As I’ve argued before, while reputation might be an intangible asset, it is one of the key economic and value drivers. Recent analysis of the modern economy shows intangible assets now dominate market valuation. For the S&P 500, intangible assets account for the vast majority of market value, a shift that magnifies the cost of reputational damage and the upside of earned trust.

Boards need to realise that the cost of recovering from a major crisis often greatly exceeds what it would have cost to invest in reasonable prevention, preparedness and reputation protection. Not treating reputation and communications expertise as strategic assets and value gatekeepers exacerbates risk, which could be managed.

How the gap hits valuation and profitability

Two linked dynamics make the expertise gap material to valuation.

First, direct shock. Cyber incidents, product safety failures, or a mismanaged employee scandal can significantly impact sales and margins. FleishmanHillard’s respondents identified cyber, supply chain, and legal or regulatory shocks as the risks most likely to damage EBITDA. When these events compound, for example, a cyber breach that triggers regulatory scrutiny, employee unrest and negative media attention, the financial effect can multiply. 

Second, the slow burn. Market confidence, customer loyalty and investor appetite are all sensitive to trust. Surveys from major trust studies show that public confidence in businesses and leaders is a significant variable in purchasing and investment choices; companies with higher trust metrics are better positioned to weather shocks. The point is stark: trust and reputation are not peripheral to the matter. They are a material factor in commercial resilience. 

For boards and investors, the implication is straightforward: reputation and communications are not 'soft' risks to be passed down the organisational chart. They are financial exposures that deserve board-level oversight, specialist expertise and clear KPIs that link back to business value. After all, as Lloyd’s of London report found, reputation can account for up to 43% of market capitalisation.

The cultural problem: risk as something to react to, not plan for

Culture is both cause and effect in the compounding crisis. FleishmanHillard finds that leaders are increasingly cautious in public because they fear internal backlash. That fear culture drives overly defensive decision-making, which can in turn precipitate escalation. In short, when boards and executives act from fear rather than insight, they make errors that compound risk.

And this view of risk is what differentiates established enterprises from lean and mobile disruptive start-ups.

Start-up leadership is typically founder-led, driven by speed and growth, comfortable with uncertainty, and more operationally hands-on. Their boards are smaller, more tactical and often reflect the interests of the lead investors. This, while Enterprise boards and C-suites are typically process-oriented, risk-averse, long-term stewardship-focused - think institutional investors, with formal committees (audit, remuneration, risk). Decision-making is often layered, consensus-driven and influenced by regulatory and investor reporting rhythms. Senior roles tend to reflect long-established governance norms, for example, finance, legal and operations expertise.

A healthy organisational culture treats issues reporting and reputational insight as routine business. It encourages early escalation, cross-functional problem-solving and scenario rehearsal. That requires not only the right processes but leadership that values openness and who are practised in communicating under pressure.

Practical recommendations for boards and leadership teams

Based on my experience, these are the practical steps boards should adopt now.

1. Embed communications and reputation expertise at board level or in direct board advisory roles: Boards must deliberately include directors or trusted independent advisers with senior strategic communications experience. The relative scarcity of CCOs in boardrooms remains a critical governance gap that shareholders and investors need to address to mitigate risk to their investments more effectively. Where directorship is not immediately realistic, establish a permanent, formal advisory role with direct access to the chair, CEO and general counsel.

2. Treat reputation as a financial metric: Introduce reputation KPIs and scenario-tested reputation stress-tests alongside liquidity and credit stress-tests. Use data and sentiment analytics to make reputation measurable and visible in board papers. Advisory firms already estimate reputation as a material share of market value; boards should take that seriously.

3. Radically Restructure Risk Committees: The siloed risk committee, focused on financial and operational hazards, is obsolete. An Integrated Risk Council must replace it. This council should formally include the Chief Communications/Reputation Officer, the General Counsel, the CHRO, the CTO, and the Head of Public Affairs. This cross-functional team must meet regularly to conduct reputational risk assessments alongside operational ones, using tools like FleishmanHillard’s issues tracker to scan the horizon for compounding threats dynamically.

4. Update director skill matrices and succession plans. Board refresh should include skills such as digital literacy, geopolitical risk, public policy, and strategic communications. For publicly listed firms, especially, these competencies are material to oversight of the business model and the firm’s licence to operate.

5. Practice with realism. Run red-team exercises that stress-test reputational scenarios, misinformation campaigns and internal leaks. Rehearsal builds the muscle memory that leadership needs to act decisively and proportionately. FleishmanHillard’s research highlights how rehearsal is one of the most effective ways to avoid decision paralysis when a real crisis arrives.

Why General Counsel must work with strategic communications advisers

I have previously argued that General Counsel and communications advisors cannot operate in silos.

Legal victories can be hollow if they leave trust in tatters, and numerous examples illustrate this. My piece on why GCs and communications advisers must work together sets out how legal risk and public risk interact, and why joint scenario planning, reputational due diligence for deals, and aligned litigation and public messaging are non-negotiable. Boards should mandate this collaboration and verify it through joint training, shared playbooks and combined briefings to the board. 

Practically, that means the GC should be part of reputation stress tests, and the CCO or reputation adviser should have unfettered access to legal counsel, ensuring that messages are both legally sound and reputationally effective. This pairing matters at every stage: pre-deal diligence, M&A integration, regulatory response and crisis response.

In fact, a good number of law firms work with reputational advisors to ensure that their clients receive the best possible counsel to ensure that the impact on intangible assets does not damage tangible and valuation.

What business and management education must do next

Business schools and executive education are habitually late to reflect commercial change. Leaders are coached and trained in many business schools, thus creating the need to re-evaluate and rethink of how reputation is taught within the curriculum. Here are three recommendations:

1. Integrate reputational risk into finance and strategy modules. If intangible assets dominate market value, then reputation should be taught as discounted cash-flow models. Students must learn to quantify reputational exposures and the consequences of poor stakeholder management.

2. Teach multi-disciplinary decision-making. Scenarios that mix cyber, regulation and social media must be standard case work. This requires collaboration between faculties: strategy, law, communications, technology and geopolitics.

3. Train for public leadership. Senior executives will increasingly act as corporate diplomats, critical in today’s growing multipolar world. Education should provide practical media and stakeholder training that simulates the pressure of real crises and the ethical trade-offs leaders will make. FleishmanHillard rightly highlights that leaders often feel isolated and underprepared; simulation-based learning helps address this issue, as well as ensuring that a modern-day board has the insight and expertise that reflects a world with more friction.

Executive programmes must also widen admissions criteria: bring in serving board members, experienced communications leaders and senior legal counsel as both students and faculty. That will make the teaching immediately more practical and relevant.

A brief note on measurement and perception

Modern measurement makes reputation manageable. There are now robust tools for sentiment analysis, issues tracking and stakeholder mapping. Use them, but do not mistake data for judgment. Measurement should inform board decision-making, not replace it. Context and scenario testing is even more critical today for companies and investors.

Two further points matter. First, the growth in value derived from intangible assets means reputational shocks are more expensive than ever. Analysts and investors will take note, and markets will incorporate reputational risk into their valuation.

Second, the public’s expectations of corporate behaviour remain fluid. Surveys show that business remains one of the more trusted institutions, but that trust is still fragile and varies by market and context. Boards should therefore assume that stakeholders will quickly judge actions, and that misreading cultural dynamics can be expensive.

A realistic call to action

Boards are not failing because they don’t have suitable people. They are failing when they rely on models and skill sets that were built for simpler times.

The FleishmanHillard report is valuable because it translates that reality into evidence and practical recommendations. Boards, chairs and senior executives should act now to:

• Reassess board skills and bring reputation expertise closer to the governance centre.

• Make reputation a governance metric with regular reporting and scenario tests. 

• Institutionalise cross-functional crisis decision-making and regular rehearsal. 

• Require GC and CCO collaboration as part of board assurance. 

• Insist that executive education reflects the multi-dimensional nature of modern risk. 

If you lead a board or advise one, this is not a theoretical conversation. It is a practical governance upgrade. The cost of inaction is clear: avoidable damage to EBITDA, market cap and the trust that powers long-term growth. The alternative is management by crisis, where companies survive by luck rather than design.

Why Trust is Your Best Growth & Venture Capital Strategy

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a conversation about the difference between Growth and Venture Mindsets and how each influences innovation outcomes quite differently. It was great to be part of this debate. Much was shared.

One of the great comments was this, “... the biggest problem with AI: humans.” And that is so true. You invest in the technology and its embedding into an organisation, whether corporate or government, but forget the end user and the need for a support framework to unlock how AI can support humans and increase productivity, because humans can resist anything that looks like a threat.

All this got me thinking about how these two philosophies, Growth and Venture, dominate a lot of the outcomes that shape innovation and the world we live in.

So, what are Growth and Venture Mindsets, and how are they different? To summarise, the former is obsessed with scaling metrics, including user acquisition, revenue curves, and market penetration, while the latter is fixated on strategic positioning, exit multiples, and portfolio returns. For years, these have been viewed as parallel tracks, sometimes even at odds with each other.

But what if the most significant multiplier for both isn't the technology or innovation, but rather perception and/or trust —the human element and the perception, as well as the appetite to risk that we have or don’t have?

Trust and perception play a critical role in innovation, yet it is often left to a tactical stage of delivery. Leveraging this requires expertise and a deep understanding of emotions and human decision-making. Trust isn't a soft skill, but a hard currency that directly accelerates growth and secures venture-scale outcomes.

The Growth Mindset: The Engine of Scale

Popularised by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, the term ‘growth mindset’ has been adopted by the business world to describe a relentless focus on scaling a company. It’s a culture of experimentation, data-driven iteration, and a ‘get-big-fast’ mentality.

What the growth mindset requires is also the right culture and the right understanding of risk-taking and the returns that risk-taking can deliver, all aligned over a specific period of time. This is equally what different countries have, a different appetite to risk based on culture and how decision makers perceive the associated risks to innovation and the associated costs, as an example, short term investment vs. short term or long term returns.

Growth Mindset can be defined as:

• Core Focus: User acquisition, market share, revenue growth, and operational scaling.

• Key Metrics: Month-over-Month (MoM) growth rates, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Lifetime Value (LTV).

This mindset is powerful and pushes teams to move quickly, break things, and prioritise speed above all else. However, the risk is that when pursued in isolation, this mindset ‘can’ harbour a fatal flaw: it often sacrifices long-term stability for short-term gains. Think of it, as ‘build and flip.’

The ‘move fast and break things’ mantra, which was once the rallying cry of Silicon Valley, over time has revealed its limitations.

Mark Zuckerberg later reflected that the focus needed to evolve. "We used to have this famous mantra... and what we realised is that it wasn't helping us to build the best services for people because building a service that is meaningful for people and that helps people connect... it needs to be reliable," he stated in an interview with TechCrunch. Make of Zuckerberg’s comments what you will, and think of how Meta is now perceived and if it is, now, an innovative company or if it just leverages it’s capital to buy up innovators?

The breaking point for many companies today trust. A data scandal, a product failure that harms users, or a toxic culture exposed to the public can halt growth overnight. Leaders in these companies often call in reputation advisers (lawyers, more often than not) when the damage is done, and often because they have not factored in perception, reputation and trust during the building, delivery and growth stages. Why? Because perception, trust and reputation are seeing as tactical and not strategic assets that are part of the brand.

Trust is what investors need to equally consider when they are supporting founders and innovators. Growth and disruption with no care or investment in building trust and reputation increases risk for investors, and that is not what investors want.

The Venture Mindset: The Architecture of Value

The venture mindset, meanwhile, is typically associated with investors and founders planning for an exit, takes a longer, more strategic, and pragmatic view. It’s about building a valuable, defensible asset that focuses on the quality of growth, not just its quantity.

Venture mindset can itself be defined and measured as follows:

• Core Focus: Business model durability, competitive moats, intellectual property, strategic partnerships, and ultimately, a successful exit (IPO or acquisition) at a high valuation multiple.

• Key Metrics: Valuation, EBITDA multiples, market capitalisation, and internal rate of return (IRR).

The venture mindset asks, "Is this growth sustainable and valuable to a future acquirer or the public markets?" This mindset is inherently risk-aware, constantly evaluating how external factors, from regulatory changes to market sentiment (perception!), could impact the company's ultimate worth.

The renowned investor Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz wrote that the fundamental challenge in building a company is communications. Horowitz said, “As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic.”

This confirming that it’s people who regulate the speed of innovation and growth, and not technology, which is iteration at greater speed that people shifting their perception of risks of innovation.

The Trust Bridge: Where Growth and Venture Converge

Effective communication and the building of trust is critical to ensure how innovators can bridge the growth and venture mindsets. Trust is not an intangible abstract concept or asset; it is a very  tangible and fluid asset that when managed correctly can help deliver sustainable growth while unlocking the realisation of venture-scale value.

Research by PwC found that organisations with high levels of trust significantly outperform their peers. They are more innovative, have stronger customer loyalty, financially perform better and are better at managing crises.

1. Trust as a Growth Accelerant

From a growth perspective, trust is the ultimate growth hacker. It reduces friction at many parts of the growth journey. Perception in and of your business influences the trust and confidence that you, your brand and your proposition have, which influences how you sell or secure investment.

Trust helps with:

• Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Customers who trust you are more likely to try your product, refer others, and forgive occasional missteps. Word-of-mouth, the cheapest and most effective marketing channel, is powered entirely by trust. A Nielsen study found that 83% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.

• Higher Lifetime Value (LTV): Trust drives retention. When customers believe you have their best interests at heart, they tend to stay longer and make more purchases. For example, after a significant data breach, a company can expect not only an immediate drop in users but also a long-term increase in churn, which can be devastating to LTV.

2. Trust as a Venture Multiplier

From a venture perspective, trust is directly quantifiable in a company's valuation. It is the ‘reputation premium’ that acquirers and public markets are willing to pay for.

Trust influences:

• Higher Valuation Multiples: A company with a strong reputation for ethical conduct, data security, and customer care is a less risky investment. It is insulated from reputation-based crises that can wipe out billions of dollars in market capitalisation overnight. As Warren Buffett famously stated, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

• M&A Attractiveness: A strong brand built on trust is a powerful competitive moat. It makes a company a more attractive target for acquisition. Large corporations, especially those in regulated industries such as finance or healthcare, will pay a significant ‘reputational’ premium for a trusted brand that aligns with their own risk and compliance standards.

The Foundational Pillars of Trust Capital

Building this ‘trust capital’ in your venture, enterprise company, or start-up requires effort from both leaders, founders and investors, and, in my experience, rests on three pillars, each demanding specific qualifications.

Pillar 1: Radical Transparency

This goes beyond marketing and tactical communications. It means being open about product limitations, transparent about data usage policies, and proactive in communicating mistakes. The qualification for founders and leaders is integrity and courage, the willingness to be vulnerable for the long-term health of the brand, as well as transparency and empathy in your tone of voice and how you communicate.. For investors, it means championing transparency even when the news is bad, understanding that covering up problems only further damages the trust and reputation further.

Pillar 2: Consistent Reliability

Trust is built in increments through consistent delivery on promises. Does the product work as advertised? Is customer support responsive? Are payroll and vendor payments made on a timely basis? The qualification here is operational excellence. Founders must build systems that ensure reliability, while investors must value and measure these operational metrics as diligently as they measure growth. An increase is positive perception and trust can equally be a signal of future improved earnings.

Pillar 3: Genuine Empathy

Trust is a human emotion. Companies that demonstrate genuine care for their customers, employees, and community build deeper, more resilient bonds. The qualification is emotional intelligence. Founders must foster a culture of respect from teh start, and investors must evaluate culture and employee satisfaction as key indicators of long-term viability of what they have or are considering investing in. If founders and leaders have a strategic understanding of the importance of trust then there is an increased chance that investments carry less risk.

The New Qualification Set for Founders and Investors

The fact is that traditional playbooks, even from the last 10/15 years, are no longer enough. The qualifications for what is needed to secure success is evolving.

For Founders:

The modern founder must be more than a visionary operator. They must also be Chief Trust Officer and have as part of their team leaders and advisers that understand:

• Proactive Communication Skills: The ability to articulate vision, own failures, and engage with stakeholders authentically.

• Ethical Data Stewardship: A deep understanding of and commitment to data privacy and security, viewing customer data as a responsibility, not just an asset.

• Crisis Management Preparedness: Having a plan for when things go wrong, focused on preserving trust above protecting ego.

For Investors:

The modern investor’s role is expanding from capital provider to trust and reputation partner. Their qualifications must include:

• Due Diligence on Culture: Actively investigating company culture, leadership integrity, and customer satisfaction during the investment process.

• Long-term Value Mentality: Prioritising sustainable growth strategies over short-term ‘pump and dump’ schemes that can damage a portfolio company's reputation.

• Governance Guidance: Using board seats to advocate for strong ethical frameworks, diverse leadership, and transparent reporting.

Fusing Mindsets for Unbreakable Growth

The difference between a growth mindset and a venture mindset is a false one. The most formidable companies of the future will not choose one over the other; instead, they will choose both. They will fuse them, using and investing in the building of trust as the catalyst and to secure growth.

Growth achieved without a foundation of trust is britille. Venture-scale value built without reputation is an illusion, a high valuation waiting for a reality check, which is why American business media outlets always focus on a loss in market capitalisation when an issue or crises happens.

The ultimate competitive advantage lies in building a company where the growth engine is powered by customer and stakeholder trust and the venture-scale outcome is secured by the integrity of the brand. Yes, it’s a more challenging path, requiring greater discipline and a broader set of qualifications from both leaders and investors. But as data and many example show, it is the only path to creating something that is not just big, but innovates and is allowed to disrupt.

Why AI Needs Human Strategists Now

The business world has been captivated by artificial intelligence (AI). From boardrooms to government agencies, leaders are under immense pressure to adopt and deploy AI, not just as a tool, but, as it’s being promoted, as a ‘cost-cutting’ solution and a transformative engine for growth and efficiency.

Tech firms have done a great job in repositioning themselves, and as a result, have secured meteoric growth. They have been great at repositioning their platforms as providers of solutions that help companies integrate their data to deploy AI models, which in turn help them secure growth. The impact that AI is already having without a doubt is huge, and we are just at the early stages of the transformation we will be experiencing.

But, there are huge caveats. Buying into AI for ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost-cutting’ ignores and even deliberately misses the critical understanding of how in the end all businesses work and grow, and that is through human interaction. AI is an incredible solution at analysing data and finding patterns. It is a tool that can automate many processes, but, in the consultancy world it still requires people with expertise and critical and cognitive thinking to verify and humanise the analysis and output.

Businesses and governments that adopt AI will grow. But the same organsiations that understand and invest in the importance of perception, trust and reputation will minimise risks and secue competitive advantage.

For growth technology drives only half of the solution. Having a team, internal, from a consultancy or agency or independent that understands human-nuances like culture, especially international culture, is where the opportunities lie for success. To a certain extent, hyper-local and hyper-personal approaches are what will help organisations achieve better returns from their tech stack, their people, and their advisers, especially those who are experts in perception, reputation, and trust.

AI can become a great foundation and engine for many organisations, great for automating tasks and suggesting broader context. But these same organisations will require strategists with expertise rather than just AI output, especially in an environment where people can already influence the output of LLMs.

The Economist: McKinsey and other consultancies are not loosing their shine. Instead, like others, they are adapting and evolving.

The Increased Demand for Human Judgment

Despite the AI hype, leadership, business, and innovation require critical thinking and experience. Organisations often turn to experts and advisors who have experience, for reasons that AI alone cannot satisfy:

1. Contextual Intelligence and Ethical Nuance: Yes, AI can analyse a dataset, but it cannot understand the cultural nuances of a workforce resistant to change, the historical baggage of a brand, or the delicate political ecosystem within which a government operates. These and many more are critical issues for international organisations. Human consultants bring cross-sector experience, applying lessons from healthcare to manufacturing, as well as from tech to nonprofits. The ability to connect disparate dots and see the story behind the data, and to build empathy between parties, is a uniquely human skill.

2. Strategic Vision, Not Just Technical Execution: A new tech partner can develop a robust algorithm that identifies patterns from proprietary data, enabling informed decision-making. That said, senior consultants can help identify the culture and emotions that can help deliver a better reputational advantage. We ask the 'why' before the 'how.' We help leaders and their teams articulate a vision that aligns technology with human purpose, ensuring that AI initiatives are not only technically sound but also strategically brilliant. This approach is what inspires and guides the future of business.

3. Stakeholder Synthesis and Consensus Building: Major transformation creates winners and losers. It disrupts power structures and creates fear. AI cannot negotiate a tense boardroom discussion, coach a CEO through a difficult announcement, or rally a sceptical employee base behind a new direction. This requires empathy, persuasion, and a deep understanding of organisational dynamics, the core competencies of experienced advisors.

The most successful advisory engagements will not see AI replacing humans, but rather augmenting them. For AI to truly unlock value amongst consultancies, communications and advisory agencies, you must have collaborative teams that have coders and tech experts with communications and reputational professionals.

The future belongs to a symbiotic model where human expertise is amplified by artificial intelligence.

How AI Empowers the Human Consultant

For strategists, AI is not a threat; it's the force multiplier. It liberates them from time-consuming analysis, remembering that time is billable, to focus on high-value, human-centric work.

• Supercharged Research and Insight Generation: AI can process vast volumes of data, financial reports, news cycles, social sentiment, and geopolitical events in seconds. An experienced strategist can use this to identify patterns, emerging risks and opportunities, understand shifting perceptions, and benchmark against competitors with unprecedented speed and scale.

• Scenario Planning and Predictive Modelling: Consultants can use AI to model countless ‘what-if’ scenarios. What if a key regulation changes? What if a supply chain is disrupted? What if a product launch fails? AI can predict potential outcomes, allowing strategists to develop pre-emptive plans and advise clients from a position of prepared strength, not reactive weakness.

• Personalisation at Scale: In stakeholder engagement, AI can analyse communication patterns to help shape messages for different audiences, identifying the concerns of investors against employees and community leaders. This creates highly personalised and effective engagement strategies developed by the consultant.

This approach encourages advisors to focus on their highest-value role: that of trusted strategic counsel. It enables them to spend less time searching for data and more time interpreting its meaning and implications for leadership.

The Critical Advantage: Strategists of Trust and Perception

This is where the argument becomes crucial for leaders and decision-makers. While many tech firms and consultants can offer AI deployment, only a select few can build and deploy a comprehensive proposition that, in addition to AI, also includes critical components of strategic communications, stakeholder engagement, and research. This skillset is no longer a ‘soft’ value-add; it’s a skillset that gives leaders confidence.

An organisation can develop the most powerful LLM in the world, but if it fails to secure the trust of its customers, employees, regulators, and investors, it will fail.

This is the core differentiator. Consultants who understand perception, reputation, and trust are uniquely positioned to ensure AI initiatives deliver real growth. Here are four reasons:

1. Building the License to Operate: Innovation, especially with AI, is often met with scepticism and fear. A strategist’s first job is to help build public trust and secure a ‘license to operate.’ This involves transparent communication, ethical framing, and proactive engagement with stakeholders to demystify the technology and align it with societal values. AI can identify a risk to reputation; a human expert designs the campaign to mitigate it.

2. Managing the Narrative: An AI rollout is a story. Will it be a story of progress and empowerment, or one of job displacement and opaque decision-making? Experts in strategic communications craft and control this narrative. They ensure the story told, both internally and externally, builds confidence and excitement, turning the deployment into a reputational asset rather than a liability. And I say this with experience of supporting teams that have led in the design and delivery of digital and data solutions.

3. Engineering Internal Alignment: The most common point of failure for many technology projects, and today, AI projects, is internal culture. Consultants who have gained real-world experience and are skilled in change management and engagement use AI-derived insights to identify pockets of resistance, understand employee concerns, and design strategies to bring people along on the journey. They turn a technical implementation into a shared mission.

4. Driving Adoption Through Confidence: Technology is only valuable if people use it, and trust is the key to adoption. By building transparent and trustworthy implementation processes, strategists ensure that end-users - businesses, investors, governments or the general public- have the confidence to embrace new AI tools, thus guaranteeing a return on the investment. This emphasis on trust-building reassures both investors and the audience of the consultants' role in the success of AI adoption.

In the world in which we are moving, consultants and advisors act as the essential bridge between the potential and hype of AI and the human reality of AI adoption. They translate code into confidence, and data into trust.

The Symbiotic Future

The rise of specialist AI firms is a welcome disruption. It pushes the entire advisory and communications industry towards greater tangibility and results. However, it does not ignore the profound need for human judgment, strategic vision, and, most importantly, the ability to manage perception and build trust. Stressing the importance of human experience and judgment can instil confidence in clients and make them feel valued and part of the process.

The leaders of today and tomorrow are not looking for a choice between AI and human expertise. They are actually looking for a synthesis. They need advisors who can bring together the raw power of AI to provide deeper insights and models, but who then apply their human cross-sector experience and deep understanding of human systems to guide the implementation.

The ultimate return on investment in AI won't be measured in teraflops or algorithms alone, but in growth, confidence, competitive advantage, and ultimately, in trust. And that ROI will be maximised by strategists who know that trust is the most valuable currency in the economy of innovation, and the one thing AI cannot generate on its own.

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The blog and article was created using an AI stack and series of prompts that I included based on my experience and career to date.

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I work with governments, investors, and corporate leaders to help them sharpen their positioning, communicate with impact, and build the kind of reputational strength that drives long-term value and trust.

Please feel free to connect or share this with your network, who may benefit. And subscribe to my LinkedIn Reputation Matters newsletter. Or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Why Soft Power is Vital In a Multipolar World

Sir John Whittingdale MP at the launch of the report.

Yesterday, at the Houses of Parliament, The Foreign Policy Centre released a report entitled, ‘Playing to our strengths: The future of the UK’s soft power in foreign policy.’ The report looks at the UK’s influence in and on the world and makes recommendations on how best to reposition itself in what is becoming an increasingly fractured and multipolar world, an issue that I have written about in the past.

Soft power is, as Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye defined it, 'the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment.' It rests on culture, values and policies that are seen as legitimate. Put simply, soft power is why people choose to work with you, study with you, buy from you or vote with you, even when you are not the biggest economy or the strongest military in the room.

While in the short term, hard power often dominates, over time attraction and credibility compounds. That is why the strategic power play is to combine hard and soft power rather than treat them individually. 

Why soft power still matters in a multipolar world

We are currently living in times when globalisation is changing and the global system is fragmenting. Power is spreading among an increasing number of actors, with economic weight been shifting towards emerging economies for several years.

The IMF estimates that in 2025, emerging and developing economies account for roughly 61 percent of world GDP measured at purchasing power parity, which underscores the reality of a more multi-centred economy. In a system where no single bloc can impose outcomes, persuasion, credibility, and networks are strategic force multipliers.

As an example, Saudi Arabia is pursuing 'multi-aligned' strategies, hedging security and leveraging it’s geoeconomic strength to secure influence, while using soft power to reposition how the Kingdom is perceived.

From campaigns to a system: an 80/20 model

In it’s report, The Foreign Policy Centre’s 2025 report on the UK’s soft power argues for an 'always on' approach underpinned by a clear delivery model.

Its core recommendation is an 80/20 strategy. Eighty percent of soft power should be left to independent cultural and creative actors to flourish. The remaining twenty percent is where government must lead through narrative, coordination, enabling regulation and targeted funding. This framing is as much about governance as it is about messages, and it suits a world in which credibility is earned by independent institutions more than by government advertising.

My view is that this is more of a 20/80 strategy, with the state setting a narrative that supports not just independent cultural and creative actors to export and promote the UK, but also businesses and investors. Like the US, which benefits from it’s corporate might, what is needed is to leverage UK business brands from across a range of sectors.

How soft power is measured and who leads

So, how is soft power measured? There is no perfect index, but Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index has become a widely used yardstick of perceptions among business leaders and policymakers.

The 2025 edition ranks the United States first, China second and the United Kingdom third. Rankings do not confer automatic wins, but indicate reservoirs of credibility that shape choices about study, tourism, partnerships and capital.

The index also highlights the United Arab Emirates holding a top-ten position globally, reflecting pro-business policies and diplomatic reach. 

What effective soft power looks like

The United Kingdom, education, sports and media

Having worked with teams within the UK Government’s Department for Business and Trade and the Great campaign, which is managed out of Cabinet Office, I know how the UK’s education, sports and media sectors are leveraged overseas, with science, technology and innovation moving into that nation branding space.

Looking at media, the BBC’s World Service reached around 450 million people weekly according to the 2024 Global Audience Measure, reinforcing the UK’s reputation for impartial, high-quality journalism. Research cited in the report indicates that BBC users show higher future intent to invest in the UK than non-users. At the same time, funding changes have forced service closures and digital-only shifts just as competitors invest in state media abroad. This is a textbook example of why credibility assets need stable, multi-year support rather than stop-start budgets.

In sports, brands like The Premier League are a year-round soft power engine with both domestic and international impact. FPC summarises 2023 to 2024 figures that include more than £8 billion value added to the UK economy and 90,000+ jobs supported.

Research by The British Council has found that a state’s soft power has a statistically significant impact on foreign direct investment (FDI), overseas student recruitment and tourism.

Government figures reported hundreds of millions in additional student spending attributable to 'Study UK,' and VisitBritain calculates that its activity delivered £1.26 billion of additional visitor spend in 2023/24. Marketing budgets fluctuate, so protecting high-ROI soft power spend matters. You invest now for the future.

The United States, exchanges and culture

Looking at the US, The Fulbright Program is a flagship of American soft power. Over the decades, more than 370,000 alumni have participated, including 62 Nobel laureates and dozens of heads of state or government. Scholarships, research networks and alumni relationships convert into policy familiarity, business partnerships and enduring goodwill.

Public diplomacy and international broadcasting are also resourced at scale through the U.S. Agency for Global Media, with a fiscal year 2025 budget request of approximately $950 million.

At the same time, sports, business and investment, especially in technology, help shape how the US is perceived as a location to invest and grow a business in.

Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios actively promote the US in markets in which they have a presence, which is many, and push a core narrative that the country is seen for.

The EU, Germany and France, cultural institutes at scale

Germany’s Goethe-Institut operates about 150 institutes across roughly 98 to 99 countries, promoting German language and culture and convening partners across education and the arts.

France’s Alliance Française network counts more than 830 language and cultural centres in over 130 countries. These long-term, locally embedded institutions make cultural engagement habitual rather than episodic, and they provide credible platforms for business dialogues and scientific cooperation. 

Germany complements this with DAAD scholarships that supported around 140,000 people in 2023 to 2024. The mobility of students and researchers fosters decades-long professional ties that influence trade, inward investment, and joint R&D. 

Japan, Selling Culture For Commerce

Japan has built a coherent soft-power stack that centres on permanent, high-trust platforms rather than one-off promotions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Japan House venues in London, Los Angeles and São Paulo curate design, food, technology and policy to broad public and influencer audiences.

Government has complemented this with targeted capital for overseas expansion of creative and lifestyle industries through the Cool Japan Fund, which reported ¥143.3 billion (US$967 billion) in capital as of March 2025.

The result is a durable perception premium: Japan ranks fourth in Brand Finance’s 2025 Global Soft Power Index, and will showcase innovation at scale through Expo 2025 Osaka, a six-month shop window that authorities hope turns attention into travel, partnerships and investment.

Soft power has translated into hard numbers. Japan welcomed a record 36.87 million visitors in 2024, with inbound spending of roughly ¥8.1 trillion that year, widely reported as the country’s second-largest ‘export’ after automobiles. Those flows sit alongside an increasingly intentional bridge from culture to commerce: JETRO’s Global Acceleration Hubs and Global Startup Acceleration Program connect Japanese firms and founders to overseas markets and co-investment partners, while corporate venture activity has scaled from ¥39.6 billion (US$263 million) in 2013 to ¥204.9 billion (US$1.3 billion) in 2023.

Corporate investors then ride the ‘Japan quality’ signal into competitive rounds abroad, exemplified by global vehicles such as Sony Innovation Fund’s SIF3, Woven Capital and others.

In practice, the cultural trust generated through perception and trust shaping and building exercises, shortens diligence windows, and improves access to high-growth founders and partners in Europe, the United States and Latin America.

South Korea, content exports and the power of culture

South Korean culture has itself meanwhile become a major export in its own right, with national government data showing content exports reaching a record US$13.24 billion in 2022, buoyed by K-drama, K-pop and gaming. Films from Korea have been recognised with Academy Awards.

Netflix has pledged US$2.5 billion for Korean content production from 2024 to 2028, a sign of sustained global demand and a reinforcing loop for brand Korea. The soft power return is not just ratings. It is tourism, product tie-ins, language learning and business familiarity.

It’s business community have benefited from the growing interest in South Korea, with brands growing internationally and supporting many enterprise companies in investing in their own corporate venture capital companies, which then invest in medium and long-term investments overseas, in markets in which they see opportunities.

These companies also create family offices, who look at growth internationally.

The Middle East: Saudi Arabia and the UAE, deliberate soft power strategy

Saudi Arabia has put soft power at the centre of Vision 2030, using mega-events, tourism and high-profile sports investments to reposition the Kingdom and diversify its economy.

The Kingdom has secured two global platforms to showcase reforms and attract visitors and capital: World Expo 2030 and the 2034 FIFA World Cup, both officially confirmed by the Bureau International des Expositions and FIFA respectively.

Tourism is the lead indicator of this reputational shift, with the Saudi Tourism Authority reporting over 100 million visitors  for the second year running in 2025 compared with 2019 levels, a milestone that aligns directly with Vision 2030’s diversification goals.

Sport has been the sharp end of Saudi soft power: with, as an example, the Public Investment Fund’s acquisition of Newcastle United anchored a durable presence in European football; the league now touts distribution in 180+ countries as it pivots from marquee signings to longer-term sustainability.

This visibility is paired with scale financial firepower: the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is targeting US$2 trillion AUM by 2030 according to Global SWF, even as outside analyses debate the path to that number and note a tactical tilt toward domestic projects that support diversification.

The strategic logic is straightforward: by hosting global events, drawing record tourism and embedding itself in elite sport, Saudi Arabia seeks to convert attention into partnerships, FDI and technology transfer, using PIF and related vehicles to turn soft-power visibility into hard-power investment outcomes under Vision 2030 that rewire the Saudi economy so it becomes less dependent on revenues from fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, in The United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai have treated soft power as a strategic programme, with the UAE having established a Soft Power Council and a national soft power strategy in 2017, and it has stayed in Brand Finance’s top ten.

Like with Saudi Arabia, the approach combines culture and heritage with pro-business regulations, diplomacy, global events, and an 'easy to do business with' reputation that underpins deal-making and investment flows.

With strategic advice and access to capital, the UAE is repositionig itself internationally.

Does soft power still add value and security?

Yes. It does not replace deterrence or industrial capacity, but it lowers the cost of cooperation and raises the cost of isolation. There are primarily five strategic payoffs:

1. Coalitions and legitimacy. Countries with trusted brands build broader coalitions and find it easier to frame rules and standards. That matters for sanctions, technology governance and climate coordination. Nye’s reminder applies here: attraction reduces reliance on sticks and carrots.

2. Talent and capital. International students and researchers can become founders, investors and senior officials. The correlation between soft power and FDI, tourism and student flows is supported in British Council research, and you can see the practical effect in the UK, US and Germany numbers above.

3. Market access. Cultural familiarity shortens sales cycles. Korea’s content boom and the UK’s education-led alumni networks are real examples of influence translating into commercial opportunity.

4. Resilience in crises. Trusted country and corporate brands are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt in times of crisis. Public diplomacy institutions and reputable media give governments and firms a credible channel to clarify facts quickly when mis and misinformation spread.

5. Room to manoeuvre. In a multi-polar and multi-aligned world, soft power creates optionality. The UAE’s experience shows how reputation, openness and convening power help a middle power keep diverse partnerships without becoming a policy taker. At the same time, time and focus, is helping Saudi Arabia reposition itself in how it is perceived.

Strategic advice for governments

1. Treat soft power as a system, not a campaign. Fund the architecture that compounds over time, including trusted media, cultural institutes, scholarships and scientific collaboration, businesses that already have a footprint overseas. Building trust takes time and it is imperative that a country is able to leverage all it’s assets, not just a few. Some companies and/or brands often have greater reach than a given government, which is why stakeholder engagement is critical to help shape perception that benefits them and the wider country.

2. Align narrative with policy reality. Attraction collapses when behaviour contradicts values. Think about the rule of law and openness as strategic assets. Keep the narrative and the story simple and human. Accept the differences, but highlight the cultural understanding. Trust is earned through mutual respect.

3. Make student mobility a national priority. Visa policy is a soft power policy. Tighten fraud controls, yes, but maintain a competitive welcome. The US, UK and Germany continue to benefit from alumni networks that last for decades. Erasmus+ scale shows the regional power of mobility. I’ve met many leaders internationally that have studied in the UK and as a result have a positive perception of the UK, similar tho those who study in the US, France or Spain. Think of how many business, political or government leaders have studied in universities in your home market?

4. Invest in digital credibility. The information space rewards speed and punishes uncertainty. Build surge capacity for crises, institutional verification, and evidence that can be quoted and linked in real time. The Reuters Institute data underline the platform shift that communicators must plan for.

5. Map and manage sharp power risks. Distinguish open cultural exchange from covert influence. Equip universities, think tanks and media partners with due diligence tools and transparency standards. Democracies should defend open exchange without being naïve about manipulation.

Strategic advice for businesses and investors

1. Price soft power into market entry. A country’s reputation for education, media freedom, rule of law and cultural affinity is a leading indicator of commercial friction. The Brand Finance index is a useful heuristic tool alongside your macro and political risk models.

2. Borrow credibility from trusted platforms. Partnerships with public broadcasters, cultural institutes and universities are not PR stunts. They are routes to high-trust audiences, regulators and future talent. For example, UK participation in British Council and GREAT activities, or German projects via Goethe-Institut and DAAD, can anchor local relationships.

3. Use culture to open doors, not close deals. Sponsoring a film festival or a scholarship will not, by itself, win a procurement in the short term. It does, however, build familiarity that shortens later negotiations and helps businesses from a home market win contracts in the medium term. Korea’s content exports and Netflix’s multi-year commitment show how culture creates commercial gravity that others can piggyback on.

4. Build alumni and diaspora strategies. Alumni from your target markets who studied in your home country, and diaspora communities in your sector, are high-leverage connectors. Treat them as strategic stakeholders, not as an afterthought. The scale of international student flows in the US, UK, and Germany is your opportunity set.

5. Stress-test corporate soft power. In contested markets, firms themselves have soft power profiles. Independent governance, sustainability performance, workforce development and transparency all influence access to capital and permits. Coherence between what you say and do remains the key to a competitive edge. At the same time, it is critical for companies to leverage and borrow the brand equity of businesses that have a presence in markets overseas.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Confusing promotion with persuasion. Saturating a market with messaging is not the same as being attractive. Credibility comes from independent voices, not only from official channels. BBC World Service and similar outlets have reach because audiences believe they play it straight.

• Underfunding the boring but vital. Scholarships, language teaching, mobility schemes and trade missions lack glamour, but they compound and influence. Germany and France show the pay-off from consistent, decades-long investment in cultural networks.

• Expect short term returns from international events. Deals can take longer than a financial year, but the fact that a country is able to bring together it’s business or cultural leaders together and showcase them overseas shows confidence and helps position the UK and it’s business community as open for business. Think short term about the cost of this and you cut your nose and let competing nations overtake you. Investment in perception shaping pays off.

What success looks like over the next five years

The success of soft power will be visible in three key areas.

First, talent and knowledge flow. Countries that remain magnets for international students, researchers and creators, soft power, will sustain innovation pipelines and alumni goodwill. The US, UK and EU nations are currently setting the pace. The goal should be to maintain welcome policies without compromising security.

Second, credible, global public service media. Weekly reach and trust in editorial independence will continue to matter. If international services can hold or grow audiences among younger, mobile-first users, they will remain key assets in crises and in everyday explanations. 

Third, culture, business with economic gravity. Korea and Japan show that cultural exports can become strategic industries. Countries that back creative ecosystems and protect intellectual property will convert attention into tourism, brand licensing, product sales and inward investment. 

The Bottom line

Soft power is not a luxury in a tougher world. It is part of national and corporate risk management, market access and coalition-building.

The multipolar system rewards those who can convene and persuade. Governments should protect independent institutions that give them credibility, keep student and cultural exchange open and measurable, and incorporate verification into their communications. Businesses and investors should weigh country's soft power alongside political risk, and invest in partnerships that borrow trust from credible platforms.

Soft power will not stop wars or roll back sanctions on its own. What it can do is lower the temperature of disputes, widen the circle of people who want you to succeed and shorten the distance between first contact and agreement. Nye’s enduring point still holds: attraction reduces your reliance on pressure and payments. In a world where neither is cheap, that is a strategic advantage you can measure.

How Trust is Critical for Investors in Private Capital Markets

A couple of days ago, I came across a great article in The Financial Times that highlighted how ‘private equity firms [were] struggling to raise money despite offering unprecedented enticements to attract new investor cash, underscoring a sector-wide contraction that is denting the profitability of the industry.’ This was not the first article that I’ve read on this subject, but, given how PE firms are such a dominant force in the GP ecosystem, it caught my attention. So, if PE firms are having issues fundraising, what is the cause and what will be the impact further down the capital chain?

Private equity firms are finding it difficult to raise money, despite offering unprecedented enticements to attract new investor capital. This struggle underscores a sector-wide contraction that is denting the industry's profitability. This fundraising slump signals a broader shift in the private capital landscape, where once-dominant performance metrics no longer guarantee access to capital. In this new environment,

Trust, reputation, and perception have emerged as the ultimate currency, one that cannot be manufactured overnight or easily repaired once it is damaged.

The Private Capital Landscape in a State of Flux

Over the past 14 months, the private equity sector has found itself operating in a markedly different landscape. Once buoyed by cheap money from low interest rates, rising valuations, and a seemingly insatiable appetite from Limited Partners (LPs), the market has shifted into a lower gear, and according to Adams Street Partners, global private equity funds raised just $746.5 billion in 2024, an 18% drop from the previous year and the lowest in four years. Meanwhile, Bain & Company reports that buyout fundraising alone declined by 23% in the same period, primarily driven by subdued investor sentiment in North America. The private equity industry is facing a reckoning, with fundraising plummeting to $592 billion in the 12 months ending June 2025—the lowest level in seven years.

Amid this downturn, distributions to investors have collapsed to just 11% of assets, marking the weakest performance since the 2009 financial crisis. Even with General Partners (GPs) slashing fees and offering unprecedented incentives, LPs remain reluctant to commit fresh capital. This caution is a clear indication of a fundamental shift, driven by a lack of confidence stemming from both macroeconomic and geopolitical issues.

The Indispensable Role of Trust, Perception, and Reputation

In the world of private capital, trust is the foundation. LPs trust GPs to act in their best interest, and GPs trust LPs to be long-term partners. Reputation is what makes or breaks this dynamic. Even in private and discreet networks, reputation is a key commodity that can both unlock capital and deals.

In today's digital world, where information travels fast, a single issue in one jurisdiction can affect a GP's ability to raise future funds or co-invest in other regions. Reputation is now a strategic asset that can either attract capital or repel it.

For both LPs and GPs, reputational risks are significant and can include:

• Failure to deliver returns or manage the downside 

• Governance breakdowns 

• Negative media coverage or activist scrutiny

• Regulatory compliance breaches 

• Misalignment with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) or DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) values 

A New Architecture of Trust: The Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds and Family Offices

The transformation in private markets is particularly evident in how sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and single and multi-family offices evaluate investment opportunities. These institutions, which hold trillions in assets under management, have moved beyond simplistic return calculations to assess the reputational infrastructure of their GP partners and the ventures they invest in.

Sovereign Wealth Funds as Strategic Financiers

SWFs are not just passive capital providers; they are strategic global financiers that view reputation as an integral part of risk management. Their investment decisions increasingly hinge on questions that extend far beyond IRR projections: Can a GP navigate regulatory scrutiny? Will their governance withstand public examination? Does their leadership demonstrate the institutional maturity required for a long-term partnership?

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) exemplify this shift. According to its 2024 annual report, PIF has approximately $913 billion in assets under management. ADIA has approximately $1.057 trillion in assets. The emergence of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi as global financial hubs illustrates how reputation and capital flow intersect in practice. When GPs partner with Emirati institutions, it signals to other investors that they have passed a sophisticated due diligence process. The credibility that comes from co-investing alongside an institution like ADIA or Mubadala validates a GP's strategy in ways that traditional marketing cannot.

The ‘Governance Premium’ of Singapore

Singapore's GIC and Temasek Holdings, with combined assets exceeding $1.4 trillion, provide another example of the role of reputation. These institutions have built a reputation for disciplined, long-term investing. They are willing to pay a governance premium, a willingness to pay higher fees and even accept lower returns, in exchange for working with GPs that demonstrate exceptional governance standards.

GIC's selectivity has created a tier system in private equity, where access to premier LPs becomes a competitive advantage. When these established LPs back a manager, they are putting their own credibility on the line, making them extraordinarily careful about due diligence.

The Growing Influence of Family Offices

The rising influence of family offices has also accelerated the importance of reputation. These investors, who now represent more than $4 trillion in investible assets globally, often make decisions based on relationship capital and trust signals that can be difficult to quantify. Unlike institutional investors with standardised processes, family offices typically prioritise the alignment of values and long-term relationships over purely financial metrics. They invest in people, not just strategies, and need to believe that their GP partners will make sound decisions even when they are not in the room. This emphasis on personal relationships creates a need for a level of trust that goes well beyond reviewing historical performance data.

Strategic Communications: A Board-Level Imperative

Given the paramount importance of trust, perception, and reputation, strategic communications is a strategic function, not just a tactical one. It is about protecting fundraising credibility, managing stakeholder perception, and supporting crisis navigation. It also enhances transparency and trust, enabling growth into new markets or sectors.

In many cases, especially when navigating geopolitical and geoeconomic sensitivities or cross-border investor dynamics, external advice adds objectivity and experience. While privacy is critical, the private nature of LP-GP relationships doesn't protect them from scrutiny. Pension fund beneficiaries read headlines. Sovereign investors are held to public standards. Even private family offices are increasingly expected to show purpose, not just profit. GPs must market themselves privately and publicly to raise their next fund, recruit top talent, and exit companies in competitive environments. Perception, trust, and reputation are no longer optional soft skills; they are board-level imperatives.

5 Questions Decision-Makers Need to Consider

Decision-makers within both LP and GP organisations must proactively manage their reputation. Here are five key questions you need to consider:

1. Are our values aligned with those of our stakeholders? This means understanding the priorities of LPs, portfolio companies, and employees, and ensuring the firm's actions consistently reflect its stated values.

2. Are we communicating performance, governance, and ESG clearly and consistently? Transparency builds trust, and in an environment where LPs are increasingly focused on operational due diligence and risk management, clear communication is non-negotiable.

3. Do we understand how internal decisions may be perceived externally? Every major decision, from acquiring a new portfolio company to making a senior personnel change, has a reputational impact that must be considered.

4. Have we identified and mapped our reputational risks and put mitigation plans in place? Proactively identifying potential risks and having a clear crisis communication plan is essential to protecting the firm's reputation and maintaining LP confidence.

5. Do we have access to experienced, discreet advisers who understand strategic communications, not just PR? A professional advisor can provide the objectivity and experience needed to navigate complex reputational challenges, from regulatory scrutiny to geopolitical sensitivities.

The New Mandate for Private Capital

The transformation of reputation from a secondary consideration to a primary factor in private markets reflects broader changes in the global financial system toward greater transparency, accountability, and stakeholder capitalism. Even in the era of AI and automation, the industry remains fundamentally human and relationship-driven, with personal relationships between GPs and LPs continuing to play a crucial role in investment decisions, especially during challenging market conditions.

For an industry built on relationships and trust, adapting to this new reality is critical for long-term survival and success.

GPs and LPs that view reputation as a strategic asset will be best positioned to attract or leverage capital, recruit talent, and thrive in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

How Soft Skills Can Power Growth in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence has moved from theory into practice at remarkable speed. Across boardrooms, government offices, and investment committees, conversations now revolve around how AI can reshape processes, reduce costs, and deliver efficiencies. Generative AI in particular has captured attention for its ability to perform data-heavy and repetitive tasks, from document drafting to market analysis, in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

Yet this focus on efficiency, while understandable, hides a strategic blind spot. Efficiency is often interpreted narrowly as doing the same work with fewer people. In this view, AI is seen primarily as a tool for reducing headcount and compressing costs. But that mindset risks undermining the very capabilities that make organisations competitive and resilient in the long term.

The real opportunity lies not in replacing human workers, but in augmenting human potential. According to PwC, AI could add as much as 14% to global GDP by 2030, the equivalent of US$15.7 trillion. Much of that value will be realised not through cost savings, but through productivity gains, enabling people to work on higher-value activities, innovate faster, and build stronger relationships with stakeholders.

The leaders who will succeed in the AI economy will be those who recognise that human skills, creativity, empathy, trust-building, and ethical judgement, are not made obsolete by AI. On the contrary, they will become more valuable as the world becomes more automated.

Technology as a Catalyst, Not a Replacement

We have been here before. The printing press replaced manual scribes, but it also democratised knowledge and fuelled entire industries in publishing, education, and commerce.

The industrial revolution displaced agricultural labourers, but it created urban manufacturing economies and spawned new professions in engineering, logistics, and management.

The computer age automated calculations and data entry, eliminating certain clerical roles, but it also gave rise to software engineering, digital marketing, cybersecurity, and a whole ecosystem of internet-based businesses.

The consistent lesson is this: societies and organisations that invest in complementary human skills during technological transitions don’t just survive, they lead. Those that fixate on cost savings without reinvesting in their people often fall behind.

Artificial intelligence is different in scope and scale, but the principle remains. AI can process and analyse information at speeds we cannot match. But the translation of that analysis into strategy, innovation, and trust-based relationships still depends on human critical thinking and insight.

The Current Landscape: Opportunity and Risk

The speed of AI adoption across sectors is breathtaking. According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey (a client), seventy‑eight percent of organisations reported using AI in at least one business function in early 2025, up from just 55% a year earlier. Use of generative AI alone rose from 33% to 71% of organisations during 2024.

As of December 2024, in the United States, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) digest reported that 28% of employed respondents used generative AI at work, with 24.2% using it in the previous week and 10.6% using it every workday. That level of uptake came just two years after the release of ChatGPT, eclipsing the adoption trajectories of personal computers or the early internet.

In the United States, between August and November 2024, generative AI was estimated to assist between 6.0% and 24.9% of total work hours among users, and between 1.3% and 5.4% of all hours across the full workforce. On average, workers reported saving approximately 5.4% of their work hours per week thanks to generative AI use. Those everyday users who engaged AI regularly reported time savings of four hours or more, with each hour spent using AI yielding roughly 33% greater productivity compared to hours without the tool.

These numbers show that AI is rapidly embedding itself into daily work routines. In consulting, for instance, firms like McKinsey have deployed tools akin to “Lilli” to streamline access to knowledge and accelerate analyses across global teams. In legal services, Dentons and other firms use generative models to support case research and contract drafting, enabling lawyers to focus on advocacy and negotiation. In finance, AI systems analyse large datasets to surface investment trends that would previously have taken analysts weeks to uncover.

The gains are real and measurable. Yet this dynamism also carries a risk, with many organisations interpreting these efficiency gains as justification for reducing headcount, especially amongst entry‑level staff.

In 2025 investment banking and consulting, firms such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan confirmed that their AI projects were intended to automate the workflows traditionally performed by juniors. While saving cost, the consequence is fewer junior hires and fewer opportunities to build on‑the‑job experience and institutional knowledge, creating a risk in the medium to long-term.

This is not a benign shift. Without early-career roles, organisations may face talent shortages later in the future. Opportunities for employees to develop judgement, negotiation, client relationship skills, and reputational stewardship through practice begin to vanish, confirming that the risk extends beyond talent pipelines and that while AI is powerful, it may only unlock value in certain domains and used by people with contextual knowledg and experience. Where generative models overstep, they generate risk and degrade performance.

All together, the uptake rates, the time-savings, and the performance pitfalls, these findings outline a double-edged landscape. On one side lies opportunity: more productive output, faster decision-making, interesting new efficiencies. On the other lies risk: erosion of capability development, degraded outcomes in edge scenarios, and organisational brittleness without human judgement.

Deployed without human guardrails AI can create risk that damage trust and reputations, critical intangible assets for businesses, investors and governments. AI only adds value when it is integrated with respect for human learning, oversight, relationship-building, and soft-power dynamics. Efficiency alone is not enough.

The Human Factor: Why We Are Not Irreplaceable

Humans are social beings. Our societies, economies, and organisations are built on networks of trust, perception, and reputation. These are not abstract concepts, they are measurable assets that influence investment decisions, political stability, and market performance.

AI can simulate conversation and predict sentiment, but it does not experience emotion, understand cultural nuance, or navigate complex ethical dilemmas. It cannot build credibility over decades with clients, voters, or citizens from different cultures.

In business, this ‘human factor’ underpins customer loyalty and brand equity. In investment, whether in venture capital, corporate venture capital or family offices, the relationship between parties will influence and shape co-investor relationships, portfolio company confidence, and the ability to attract the right partners. In government, it determines public legitimacy and international influence.

These are precisely the domains where AI should be used as a support tool, not a substitute.

AI can monitor brand sentiment in real time, flagging shifts in public opinion. But it takes human judgement to decide how to respond in a way that protects or enhances reputation. AI can identify potential risks in a supply chain, but it takes human negotiation to resolve them in a manner that strengthens relationships rather than damaging them.

And I haven’t talked about the challenges AI faces surrounding cultural sensitivities, given that many US-trained models implicitly encode Western norms and reasoning frameworks.

A position paper by Amr Keleg from the University of Edinburgh rightly argues in my view that LLM development efforts often wrongly assume cultural homogeneity within the Arab world, even though social norms, values, and worldviews can differ dramatically across countries and communities. As a result, such models can inadvertently produce responses that feel tone-deaf, inaccurate, or contextually inappropriate in Arabic-speaking markets.

Responding to this gap, organisations in the Gulf have begun developing native Arabic models that better reflect local linguistics and cultural nuance. For instance, the UAE’s ATRC/TII released Falcon Arabic in May 2025. Trained on 600 billion tokens of native Arabic text spanning regional dialects, it matches the performance of much larger, non-Arabic models while requiring significantly fewer resources. Similarly, the open-source model Jais, developed through a UAE‑based collaboration, combines English and Arabic in its training and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance in Arabic contexts.

Productivity Over Efficiency: A Strategic Reframing

Efficiency is about doing the same things with fewer resources. Productivity is about achieving more valuable outcomes with the same or fewer inputs. In other words, efficiency cuts; productivity expands.

Consider Disney’s ‘tiger teams’, cross-functional groups bringing together experts from animation, marketing, and data science. AI handles scheduling, data retrieval, and background research. The humans focus on creative problem-solving, audience engagement, and brand storytelling. The result is not just faster work, but richer, more innovative outcomes.

This is the model that leaders in all sectors should aim for: AI taking care of the mechanical and repetitive, humans driving the creative and strategic.

Business: Building Customer-Centric AI

In the corporate world, AI offers clear opportunities to improve customer service, optimise supply chains, and develop products faster. But the real differentiator will be how companies maintain and strengthen their human touch.

Customers may accept automated interactions for basic queries, but loyalty is built through personalised, empathetic engagement. If AI is deployed purely to cut costs by removing people from the process, the risk is that customer trust erodes. Once lost, trust is expensive, and sometimes impossible, to regain. And where trust is lost, so is reputation and the perception of leaders and organisations that deploy AI without an understanding of human nuances.

The companies that will thrive will use AI to empower their people, giving them better insights, freeing their time for higher-value conversations, and supporting them in delivering consistently excellent customer experiences.

Investment: AI as an Enabler of Trust-Based Deals

For investors, from corporate ventures with their specific cultures to single-family offices, AI can transform due diligence, market analysis, and portfolio monitoring. It can surface risks earlier and identify opportunities faster. But closing a deal still depends on human relationships.

In private equity or venture capital, deals are often won or lost on the basis of trust between parties. AI can help identify potential partners; it cannot replace the judgment required to assess whether those partners share your values, strategic vision, and appetite for risk.

And for portfolio companies, well, investors who bring both capital and reputation management and development expertise will be increasingly valuable. In highly regulated sectors, the ability and agility to manage public and government perception will be as critical to growth as financial performance.

As I said before, giving AI tools to a CEO or their Chief Investment Officer to issue communications that is outside of their individual area of expertise creates risk.

Government: Balancing Automation and Legitimacy

In government, AI can streamline administrative processes, analyse policy impacts, and support rapid decision-making. But governance is not just about efficiency; it is about legitimacy. Citizens want to know that human beings are making decisions that affect their lives, guided by empathy, ethics, and accountability.

If governments use AI solely as a cost-cutting tool, they risk creating perceptions of detachment and technocracy. If, instead, they use it to give civil servants more time to engage with communities, explain policy decisions, and negotiate internationally, they strengthen both their effectiveness and their credibility.

Within the UK Government, the focus has been to deploy AI to deliver solutions so that taxpayers money is better deployed to the delivery of front-line services. As an example, the UK Government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence delivered the Health Deterioration and Fall Prediction Tool to analyse real‑time patient vital signs, such as heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure, to predict early signs of health deterioration and fall risk in home care settings. Developed in partnership with health tech provider Cera, the tool, now deployed across two‑thirds of NHS integrated care systems as of March 2025, is used in over two million home care visits monthly. It generates high‑risk alerts with 97% accuracy and prevents around 2,000 falls and hospital admissions per day, reducing hospitalisation by up to 70% and saving the NHS over £1 million per day.

Trust, Perception, and Reputation as Growth Catalysts

In the AI economy, trust, perception, and reputation will be the decisive competitive factors. They will act as intangible commodities that can open or close the doors to growth.

An organisation with a reputation for ethical AI use will attract customers, investors, and partners who share its values. One that is perceived as using AI to hollow out jobs and cut corners will face resistance, regulation, and critical reputational damage.

Trust, as Warren Buffett said, takes years to build and seconds to lose. Perception shapes reality in markets, elections, and negotiations.

Reputation determines the quality of opportunities that come your way. These are human-led assets. AI can help measure and monitor them, but it cannot create or sustain them on its own.

The Human-Centred AI Future

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping businesses, economies and our world, but it will not replace the fundamental truth that human relationships, creativity, and judgement are the ultimate drivers of sustainable growth.

Leaders who treat AI as a partner in productivity, rather than a blunt instrument of efficiency, will unlock the greatest value. That means reinvesting productivity gains into their people, maintaining pathways for talent development, and embedding trust, perception, and reputation into their organisations and AI strategies.

Technology is changing the game, but human skills will help you win it!