The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving · FirmsConsulting.com & StrategyTraining.com

620: Former McKinsey partner on How to Turn a Profit and Improve Lives in the World's Toughest Places (Strategy Skills classics)

·50 min·3 clips

The Beirut partner turns out to be the area Hezbollah commander, not the civic leader they expected.

1. The Strategy Skills Podcast episode follows former McKinsey partner Viva Onna Batkus and her work on Business on the Edge: How to Turn a Profit and Improve Lives in the World's Toughest Places. 2. Viva Onna Batkus is a former McKinsey & Company partner, founder of Business on the Frontlines, and Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. 3. The episode asks how business can create profit, jobs, and stability in places that are impoverished, isolated, and frequently lawless. 4. Viva describes growing up in a small town in rural Indiana as the child of Lithuanian World War II refugee immigrants. 5. She says National Geographic fed her curiosity, and McKinsey became a "ticket to see the rest of the world" and to serve clients. 6. She explains that she joined McKinsey after graduate-school students she respected reported strong learning and enjoyment at the firm. 7. Viva says she entered McKinsey in the first class hired with non-MBAs and completed a one-month "mini MBA" training program. 8. She recalls being the first female, non-MBA, and youngest partner in the Chicago office, with no line for the women's bathroom at partner meetings. 9. She says early-career consultants should "massively over deliver" in the first six to nine months because reputation matters. 10. She describes her promotion to partner as involving evaluation from a Toronto-based Canadian practice director who later called her personally and flew to Chicago to advise her. 11. Viva says that move to Notre Dame was a return to her "first love" of teaching, mentoring, scholarship, and the life of the mind. 12. She defines "front lines" as communities in low-income and middle-income countries that lie a hundred miles away from the international airport. 13. She says these front-line areas are overlooked by corporations, but her book argues they are the next great globalization opportunity. 14. Viva gives the scale as 1.4 billion people and over $20 trillion in annual economic activity, then says traditional market-entry models do not work there. 15. She explains that in Lebanon the classic local-partner approach led her team to Khalil, who was later identified as the area Hezbollah commander. 16. She says the lesson from Lebanon was to build broader partnerships, spend more time listening, and avoid assumptions about local motivations. 17. Viva uses Colombia's 2016 Havana Accords and 8,000 demobilized FARC fighters to show how business can support reintegration. 18. She says her team helped establish agricultural businesses and campesino markets in San Jose del Guaviare, which helped shift the area from a food importer toward local production. 19. The conversation is interview-based, reflective, and detailed, with Viva moving between biography, field examples, and framework-style advice. 20. Listeners who care about strategy in fragile states, development, and business for peace will get the most from it; listeners wanting quick generic consulting advice may skip it.

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