MAP CEO Nader Mousavizadeh on The Age of Asymmetry

"In the age of asymmetry, the most consequential vulnerabilities will often be the least visible, and the most consequential strengths the least familiar.” 

MAP CEO Nader Mousavizadeh writes in the Financial Times on how we are living through a transitional period in which power flows less from size or wealth than from the ability to convert imbalance into leverage.

Strategic advantage now accrues to actors that recognise the imbalance and act on it before a new equilibrium settles. Those that fail to do so risk absorbing costs they have not yet learned to price – from exposure to critical shipping chokepoints to dependence on inputs they cannot easily replace.

Three dynamics define the age of asymmetry:

• At the operational layer, the disrupter holds the advantage. Cheap drones and missiles have repriced war risk across the world's most critical shipping chokepoints, and in the cyber domain, scale offers little protection.

• At the infrastructure layer, a small number of actors control the nodes on which everyone else depends – dollar clearing, chip fabrication, rare-earth processing, undersea cable fleets – and are increasingly willing to use that control.

• At the political layer, authoritarian systems are structurally insulated from the domestic costs of strategic competition in ways that democracies, locked into electoral cycles, are not.

With sovereignty now the operating principle of resilience, corporate success will require increasing self-reliance, hardening positions against the leverage others hold and wielding the asymmetric advantages they themselves possess.

You can read the full article in the Financial Times here: "We are living in the Age of Asymmetry".