About Soft Power, Hard Problems
Soft Power, Hard Problems by Sophie Krantz is a newsletter for leaders whose decisions echo beyond their own organisation – across energy, supply chains, finance, technology, and public institutions.
It’s for people who know they have real soft power - influence, relationships, coalitions, narrative weight – but suspect too much of it is being spent on the status quo instead of the problems that actually matter.
What I mean by soft power
Soft power is your ability to shape what others want to do - through trust, credibility, example, relationships, coalitions, stories and standards - rather than through formal authority, money or coercion.
In practice, it shows up as:
Who takes your calls and actually changes course after talking with you
Which rooms you can convene, and who shows up when you ask
Where your framing of an issue tends to “stick” – inside your organisation, your sector, or wider debates
Which standards, norms or protocols quietly reflect your preferences
If any of that is true for you, you already have soft power. The question is what you’re spending it on.
What I mean by hard problems
Hard problems here are system‑scale challenges whose outcomes affect millions, often billions, of people - such as:
Energy transitions and critical minerals
AI and data regimes
Supply‑chain and financial stability
Democratic resilience and global health
They’re hard because politics, markets and technology are tightly entangled, and no single actor can fix them alone.
For any given leader or firm, the hard problem is the specific slice of that system where your decisions genuinely change how those millions or billions are affected, not just your own quarterly results.
What you’ll get here
I focus on a small set of practical ideas you’ll see again and again:
A soft‑power balance sheet – making your real influence visible and measurable
The no new budget test – what you’d do on a hard problem if you couldn’t hire or spend more
Middle‑power playbooks – how not‑dominant, not‑powerless actors (countries, firms, funds) move systems
Zoom‑out / zoom‑in models – going from global context to 90‑day experiments
You can expect:
Short, clear essays that define terms precisely, not buzzwords
Case‑based examples (like Australia’s role in critical minerals, or specific AI / trade / climate junctions)
Questions and checklists you can steal for board, ELT or policy discussions
Ways to design small, real‑world experiments under constraint, rather than wait for perfect conditions
Who I am
I’m Sophie Krantz, a global strategy advisor.
I work with leaders whose decisions affect millions (and sometimes billions) of people to use their soft power – influence, coalitions, standards and experiments – to move the hard problems they can’t fix with budget and headcount alone.
I’ve advised governments, multilateral institutions, and companies in energy, resources and technology on strategy at the intersection of geopolitics, markets and systems change.
Where to start
If you’re new, good entry points are:
When we waste our soft power, hard problems get worse – the core manifesto for this work
The Soft Power, Hard Problems check‑up – a 5‑minute self‑diagnostic on how ready you are to use your influence this way
And if a piece hits close to home, you can always email me (sophie(at)sophiekrantz.com) message me below or on LinkedIn to compare notes.
