Dr Pippa Malmgren – Economic Policy Adviser

Dr. Malmgren is an economist who makes sense of the world economy and geopolitics by writing books, by founding tech businesses, by advising policymakers around the world and through public speaking and teaching. 

Her speciality is understanding the nexus between geopolitics, tech innovation, strategic security and markets. 

She is a Strategic Advisor to C10 Labs, the MIT Media Lab based AI Venture Studio. 

She is currently a Fellow of the The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation for 2022-2024. 

She is also on the Board of Premios Verdes which holds the annual “Green Oscars” to support the best cleantech start-ups in emerging markets. 

She is a member of the Advisory Board at Streamline Media, the firm that built many of the most successful video, digital and VR games in modern history. 

She is also a Founder member of LUNARC, a project to ensure the first human institution on the moon represents the arts and humanities. 

She also serves on the Judging Panel of The King’s Awards for Enterprise since 2017. 

She is also an advisor to several start-ups in various areas: space, nuclear fusion, lunar logistics and subsea internet cables. 

She writes a column about the world economy and geopolitics on Substack. 

She served President George W. Bush in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and on The National Economic Council. 

She served on the President’s Working Group on Corporate Governance and The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. After 9/11 she was also assessed Terrorism Risks to the Economy and Pentagon procurement from tech startups. 

Before joining the White House, she ran the Bankers Trust Asset Management business in Asia and then served as the Global Chief Currency Strategist.

She was then named the Deputy Head of Global Strategy at UBS. More recently she advised the British Cabinet on trade issues as a Board Member for The Department for International Trade from 2017-2019. 

She is a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI, the world’s leading defence think tank. 

In 2014, she co-founded a robotics firm that made industrial drones which won the Cog X Award for Autonomy, the 2020 National Technology Award and Power Product of the Year 2020. 

She has been a Senior Advisor to The Monaco Foundry, a European start up incubator for impact-led founders since 2020. 

She previously served on the Advisory Boards of the Legatum Center at MIT, The Ditchley Foundation, and Indiana University. 

Her most recent bestseller, The Infinite Leader, won the International Press Award for the Best Book on Leadership for 2021.

Her book, The Leadership Lab, was named Business Book of the Year and Best Book on Leadership in 2019 and won the International Press Award 2020.

She is also the author of: Geopolitics for Investors (2015) and Signals: How Everyday Signs Help Us Navigate the World’s Turbulent Economy (2016/7). 

She has been named one of the Fifty Top Inspiring Women in the UK and one of the Top 100 in Tech by @WATC_WeAreTech. 

In 2024 she was awarded the Mission College Women in Leadership Prize. She has a BA from Mount Vernon College and an M.Sc. and PhD from LSE. She completed the Harvard Program on National Security. 

She gave the graduation address at the London School of Economics in 2013 and 2016.

She is an occasional lecturer in the Duke Fuqua Global Executive MBA Program, Sandhurst and The Royal College of Defence Studies. 

Commercial firms like Google, Rolls Royce, American Express, Deloitte, major banks like Citigroup and Barclays and asset managers like State Street, various governments and military leaders regularly retain her to speak on leadership, the future of the world economy, tech innovation and geopolitics.

Keynotes

Pioneering a Prosperous Path: Navigating Geopolitics & Embracing Technology in the New Era of Abundance

As we enter the US Presidential election year, the world faces extraordinary geopolitical challenges. 

We are in a Hot War in Cold Places (the Arctic, space, and deep tech) and a Cold War in Hot Places (Africa, the Pacific) and not just in Ukraine.

Russia and China and the US seem to be on a collision path, though that may be a precursor to a deal. 

China and the US are racing to establish a base on the moon and infrastructure in space. 

Space based technology look set to deliver many solutions to Earth-bound problems including unlimited clean, green energy through space-based solar power, unlimited resources from asteroid mining and unlimited internet connectivity that will raise the value of every square inch on Earth.

The each for abundance could trigger either conflict or a peaceful resolution of geopolitics on Earth. 

Meanwhile, the pace of technological innovation in all fields is increasing faster than our capacity to understand it, especially in AI. 

AI as more our friend than our enemy, after all, it’s a reflection of us. It will create a wave of new jobs as we see ever more abundance unfold. 

Dr. Malmgren has been a manufacturer of robotics, automation and AI-led software.  

She says the future lies in shardware which is when hardware and software combine to create value. 

The West is getting good at (s)hardware again but we have to open our imagination to the possibility of things like computer chips being manufactured in space and being directed into off-Earth manufacturing.

Dr. Malmgren explains the grand landscape of geopolitics that extend far beyond Ukraine and into tech including AI, life sciences and the space economy, which all mean that our practical and geopolitical problems can now be more easily addressed and resolved. 

The US Presidential election, she argues, will also be driven by technology. 

Bill Clinton came to office on the back of Saturday Night Live (playing the Sax) on TV.

President Obama rode the YouTube wave. 

President Trump relied on Twitter. The next President will be a Podcast President, meaning there is going to be a reduced focus on sound bites, traditional media channels and a deeper focus on policy substance than we’ve seen in years. 

As usual, the US is likely to elect someone no one imagined possible three years before.

Nobody ever heard of Clinton, Obama or imagined that GW Bush or Trump could win.

After predicting Trump could win in 2016, at a time that this seemed impossible, Dr Malmgren now sees a fascinating new scenario that very much depends on geopolitics.

Most of the key candidates are environmentalists and Bitcoin supporters. 

This will accelerate us into a different future.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding that the battlefields of war are not just in Ukraine, but span across the globe – and perhaps surprisingly, but of incredible importance – in outer space.
• With a refreshingly optimistic perspective, this speech demonstrates how AI and emerging technology will create a wealth of abundance for humankind.
• By highlighting key opportunities for international collaboration, Dr Malmgren predicts peaceful and prosperous outcomes for our current geopolitical issues.
• Although US Presidential elections can cause uncertainty, Dr Malmgren provides pivotal signals to observe during the campaigns, and advises the audience to prepare for the rise of the first Podcast President.

Frontiers of the Future: The Soulful Approach to AI and Emerging Tech

As an economist, Dr Malmgren decided to be part of building the world economy instead of just talking about it. 

She helped launch an award-winning firm that manufactured aerial, terrestrial and marine drones. 

This allowed her to see how automation, robotics, remote-control, AI, materials and super computing all come together to create new possibilities. 

She is fundamentally an optimist and reminds us the automation, robotics and AI have so far created more jobs than they have destroyed. 

She brings a fundamentally optimistic view about technology as she explores and explains the new sectors that are opening up the world economy: space infrastructure and space manufacturing, automation, robotics, remote-control, and AI-led systems, the incredible expansion in life-sciences and material sciences that mean we can create not only new materials and life itself. 

We can also combine dry computers with wet, biological, computers to create synthetic combinations that may exceed our capacity to comprehend possibility.

Computational power is expanding exponentially.

Today’s super-computers and Quantum computers allow us to solve problems that used to take system 10,000 years to process (faster than any human) now take 200 seconds. 

We have never been blessed with such extraordinary problem-solving power.

The expansion of technology and the flow of the internet means that we have to absorb ever more information to understand our world. 

This is why humans are shifting from words to symbols and images. 

The volume of information must be compressed. 

Not only do we prefer using emojis to words but increasingly all corporate reporting and information is being converted into immersive Web 3 experiential content. 

The 3D world is already tricking the human mind into recovering from burns more quickly and allowing higher quality meat and milk from cows. 

It is not just that gaming technology is fun. It is effective and will be how we tell the stories of technological change itself.

All this creates a world where greater abundance and ease becomes possible. Humans can work smarter and less hard yet get ever more powerful results. 

But, we have to learn to allocate time more effectively to collaborations and to creation instead of just consumption. 

The greater the tech, the more need there is for a soulful approach to life.

AI is optimizing for efficiency and cost but humans optimize for joy, love and novelty. 

Companies and countries will have to decide how efficient humans can or should really be.

Key Takeaways:

• The speech is fundamentally optimistic and will demonstrate how technology has always, and will continue to create more opportunities than it disrupts – including new job creation, extraordinary human progress and greater abundance for all.
• By providing personal anecdotes and real-world examples, Dr Malmgren illuminates the future of unprecedented computational power and how solving complex problems at an extraordinary pace will revolutionise our ability to tackle the impossible.
• The rise of immersive Web 3 content and 3D experiences will drive more effective communication (hugely impactful for any organisation needing to drive engagement with clients) and revolutionise diverse fields, from healthcare to agriculture and beyond.

Leadership Renaissance: Inspired Working, Shaping Worlds & Forging Collective Culture

Dr Malmgren has several award-winning books on leadership in which she talks about heartfelt leadership and soulful working: The Leadership Lab (Business Book of the Year 2020) and The Infinite Leader (International Press Award 2021). She explains what underpins the many leadership failures of recent years. 

The world has changed and now people need to be motivated rather than told. Leadership is more about the “ship” than the “leader”. She emphasises that in a fast-innovating world, imaginal skills now have as much or more value than analytical skills.

Top down leadership simply doesn’t work when the pace of change is accelerating so fast. 

People now want to be inspired rather than to be ordered.

In her written and spoken work, Dr Malmgren has also introduced the concepts of Cosmopoeisis and Conscious Capitalism. Cosmopoeisis is the act of world creation, which is much bigger than creating an idea or a business or a product or program. 

JRR Tolkien, Steve Jobs at Apple, Phil Knight at Nike and other visionary leaders all understood that the most successful ideas are about creating a world where others can become their best selves. 

It is about creating an invitational space. 

Conscious Capitalism is not just about being green or clean. It is also about thinking through the consequences for others. 

Peter Drucker always said, “businesses have to be profitable,” but real brands are built on their social purpose. 

That means awareness of consequences is essential for all leaders these days. Awareness of supply chains and social costs are essential to brand management and corporate success.

In this speech, Dr Malmgren proposes ‘situational fluency’ as a new area of study – the ability to understand and move between multi-dimensional spheres and silos of expertise. 

This will allow leaders to join the dots across the landscape of reality to create a new global narrative on which a fresh leadership approach can be based.

Key Takeaways:

• Audiences will learn how to acquire sharper situational awareness, greater diversity of thinking, a willingness to lead from the heart rather than the
• head, and understand that the nature of leadership itself has evolved.
• In this speech, Dr Malmgren compares and contrasts old ways and news ways of leadership – and explains why these shifts are inevitable and how they will touch communities, companies and countries alike. It  does not matter how successful you are. 

It is possible to up your game.

Understand why culture is the key. Human interest in coming together will always be the key to successful resolution of differences. 

Culture still beats strategy.

Why you should book Pippa Malmgren for your next event

As a former White House advisor to President George W. Bush, Pippa brings unmatched expertise in global economic strategy, helping organizations make informed, high-level decisions.

Pippa’s work in tech innovation, including co-founding a drone manufacturing company that won multiple national awards, highlights her ability to drive technological advancements.

Founder of DRPM Group, Pippa advises global investors on emerging market trends, offering invaluable guidance for businesses seeking to anticipate and capitalize on future opportunities.