Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak
The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak earns The Strategist designation by correcting the map before executives act on it. As BCG's Global Chief Economist, his contribution is neither reassurance nor alarm but recalibration, exposing how macro commentary systematically inflates tail risks into central scenarios. His litmus test framing applies conditional, structured logic to economic conditions, cutting through noise to isolate what actually matters for decisions. It is analysis in service of action, the strategist's essential discipline.
“A lot of what I do in conversations with executives is to unskew some of the perceptions they pick up in the press, which is reliably dialed down to the doom-mongering side of things.”
“We take these risks in public discourse that are the edges of the risk distribution — tail risks — and we pretend that they're in the middle of the distribution.”
“The litmus test for me is often what would it take for a certain doomsday outcome to actually come to pass — walk me through the conditions that lead us to the precipice.”
Masters in Business: “Economic Risks Versus Media Alarmism with Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak”
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