SIG’s Leadership Team

  • Based in Fort Worth, CEO Gordon Dee Smith has advised on over US $120 billion in investment transactions and has conducted projects in areas ranging from geopolitical analysis to transactional intelligence for the finance, technology, defense, energy, retail, transportation, and healthcare industries, among others. Prior to founding SIG, he headed a venture capital firm bringing European investment into Latin America, was an intelligence contractor for the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and was a founder and president of an international NGO, InterCultura. Smith is Chair of the Advisory Board of LLILAS/Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin, a board member and past president of the board of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations, a board member of Global Americans in New York, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Bretton Woods Committee and the Advisory Board of the Houston Committee on Foreign Relations. He was co-creator, host, and producer of A World On The Brink, a 5-part documentary series on geopolitical risk and global change.
    www.GordonDeeSmith.com
    Twitter: @DeeSmithTexas

  • Andrew Mabry, Chief Operating Officer of Strategic Insight Group, began his career at SIG as an Intelligence Analyst in 2011. In that capacity, he conducted hundreds of fraud-related and enhanced due diligence investigations of individuals and organizations. He was appointed Senior Analyst and Project Manager in 2013, where his duties expanded to include all phases of the project lifecycle. Since becoming Chief Operating Officer in 2015, he has managed over a thousand intelligence investigations in several dozen countries and has regularly briefed clients on significant information discovered in the course of the investigations. He has also been responsible for key operational transformations at the company, the most-recent being a bespoke web application that he designed and built using a low-code platform. It ensures efficient management not only of projects but also of customer relationships. He studied in the United States and Germany, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Texas Christian University. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) with expertise in fraud-related investigation and public record collection.

  • Bronson Stocker has been an advisor to SIG since its inception in 1996. He began his career with KPMG (as a Certified Public Accountant) and then worked for Bank of America (formerly InterFirst Bank) in Dallas and London, during which time he managed the Bank’s Energy and Corporate relationships of US subsidiaries in the UK. In Dallas, he also managed the Bank’s Trade Finance Group (Southwest), dealing with a variety of clients in Latin America. He then joined Bell Helicopter Textron and facilitated financing for international and large program aircraft sales. In 2002, he joined Standard & Poor’s and managed relationships with the firm’s rating clients: Fortune 500 companies, P/E investments vehicles, and large private companies throughout the Southwest US.

  • Roderick Grierson has been executive editor and director of research since joining SIG in 2006. He has supervised the production of more than ten thousand reports and geopolitical intelligence projects, including detailed analyses of the private and public sectors in the Middle East, India, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Having founded an international NGO with Gordon Dee Smith in 1985, he spent ten years organizing global cultural exchange programs. He has been a Fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard and Menteşezade Research Fellow and Director of the Rumi Institute in Nicosia. He has published extensively on the history of Turkish literature and Anatolian Sufism and has lectured at a wide range of conferences, universities, institutes, and museums.

  • Adam Grech joined SIG in 2018 following the completion of a Master of Science in Defense, Development, and Diplomacy at the University of Durham. He previously worked in law and journalism, and has a research background focusing on international security and economic development.

  • Cole Ritchie joined SIG in 2016 after earning his PhD in Musicology at the University of North Texas in 2015. He has presented his scholarly research at conferences on music and translation in Austria, Canada, and the United States and has published in American, Austrian, and German musicological journals and critical editions.

  • Marianne Dwight served for more than a decade as general counsel at the Texas Treasury Safekeeping Trust Company, a sovereign wealth fund of the State of Texas with over $65 billion in assets under management. As a voting member of the investment committee, she participated in the investment process and understands how important it is in allocating monies to achieve target returns for the portfolio. As a public speaker, Dwight has addressed issues relating to the investing industry including ESG principles, responsible governance, fiduciary obligations, private equity/portfolio company concerns and transparency, as well as international water resource issues.

  • Scott Malcomson joined SIG in 2016, managing private intelligence projects in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Malcomson has worked in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Central and East Asia, the Pacific islands, and the Middle East, including senior positions at the United Nations, the US State Department, the New York Times, and International Crisis Group. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, and New Republic. He has published five books, the most recent being Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce Are Fragmenting the World Wide Web. He has delivered lectures at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Tsinghua, and Columbia. A board member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and PEN. He was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the University of Cambridge.

  • Hugh Hackney has conducted litigation, dispute resolution, and related activities across the globe. From 2005 to 2015, he was a partner at Greenberg Traurig, where he headed the international litigation practice, and was previously a partner at Locke Lord and Fulbright & Jaworski. Hackney was President of the Board of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations and is a member of the International Chamber of Commerce Commission on Arbitration, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the London Court of International Arbitration, the International Bar Association, and the Society of International Business Fellows.

  • Recently appointed as SIG’s Director of Client Services, Mario Mercado was Research Editor of Travel + Leisure, a division of American Express Publishing Corp in New York City, for 19 years. During this time, he managed the research division, supervising multilingual assistant research editors as well as junior and freelance staff and interns. He produced a monthly print publication, along with related products such as Travel + Leisure Family, 3 series of books, and online editorial content. He established research criteria for the production of new and evolving editorial platforms and packages, evaluated and refined department functions on an ongoing basis, particularly during the expansion and growth of the brand, and worked with international editions of Travel + Leisure from Mexico to Korea.

  • Susan Guthrie has been with SIG since 2016. She studied Political Science at Eastern New Mexico University. Before she joined SIG, she spent ten years in Commercial Real Estate as an Assistant in Accounting, Construction, Development, Property Management, and Leasing. She is a volunteer at several charitable organizations in Savannah, Georgia and is a Founding Member of Grapevine Savannah Professional Women for Good.