What Carney’s Davos speech reveals about strategic thinking.
At Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood up and said something most world leaders won’t. The rules-based international order—the system of shared institutions, trade agreements, and multilateral cooperation that has underpinned global prosperity for eight decades—is over.
Not under strain. Not in transition. Over.
“The old order is not coming back,” he said. “Nostalgia is not a strategy.“
It was a striking moment. But for anyone who spends time working with founders and senior leaders, Carney’s analysis of what comes next was even more interesting than the diagnosis itself.
The Temptation to Build Fortresses
When the rules stop protecting you, the instinct is predictable: build higher walls. Develop your own supply chains. Create internal capability for everything. Stop depending on others. In geopolitical terms, Carney called this strategic autonomy—and he acknowledged it has genuine logic. A country that can’t feed, fuel, or defend itself has limited options.
But he was unsparing about where this leads: “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.”
The trap isn’t the desire for autonomy. It’s the assumption that autonomy and interdependence are opposites—that the only way to reduce your exposure to risk is to stop depending on anyone else.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that shows up in businesses too.
What Strategy Actually Says About This
There’s a framework we come back to regularly in our work with founders—the Oxford approach to strategy, built around four Ps: Purpose, Position, Partnerships, and Plan.
The Partnerships dimension often gets treated as the soft one. The relationship-maintenance bit. The nice-to-have.
Carney’s speech is a case study in why that’s exactly backwards.
Strong partnerships—whether that’s international institutions like the WTO and the UN at a geopolitical level, or strategic alliances, trusted networks, and shared infrastructure at a business level—do something specific and quantifiable: they distribute the cost of resilience.
As Carney put it: “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum.”
In other words, the cost of strategic autonomy can be shared. Partnerships aren’t a vulnerability to be managed—they’re a risk-reduction mechanism. When the environment becomes more volatile and uncertain, the value of strong partnerships goes up, not down.
This has a direct parallel in businesses navigating growth inflection points. The founders we work with most often face a version of this choice: do we build the capability internally, or do we invest in the partnerships and ecosystem that means we don’t have to? The former feels safer. The latter usually is safer—and significantly cheaper.
The More Ambitious Question
What Carney was really asking the middle powers was: can you resist the temptation of the obvious move?
Building the fortress is the obvious move. It’s legible, it feels decisive, and it’s something you can point to. But it carries enormous cost—financial, relational, and strategic. It locks you into a position that looks strong but is brittle.
The harder, more ambitious move is to deepen partnerships selectively and strategically, to build shared standards rather than parallel ones, and to invest in the collective infrastructure that makes the whole system more resilient—not just your corner of it.
For founders navigating growth, team transitions, or market uncertainty, the question maps cleanly: where are you building fortresses when what you actually need are better partnerships?
Build your next + future
These are the questions worth sitting with. They rarely have quick answers—but asking them clearly is the beginning of real strategic thinking.
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