The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving

In this episode with Rishi Dave, a partner in Bain's Commercial Excellence practice with deep expertise in B2B marketing and digital marketing, he explains the concept of a "Day 1 List" in B2B sales and marketing and the three things that will get a supplier or seller on the list. Rishi also discussed what a "sales play" is, how to build it, institutionalize the knowledge within the company, and get the sales team to adopt the sales play to fulfill their potential and increase their productivity and sales.
Rishi Dave partners with CMOs and management teams to drive marketing transformations and build modern marketing capabilities. He serves as an expert on the implementation of Bain's B2B Marketing Diagnostic and Sales Play System.
Rishi has held global CMO roles at public technology and cloud companies, including Dun & Bradstreet, Vonage, and MongoDB. Prior to these roles, he served as the global head of digital marketing for Dell's B2B businesses. Rishi started his career at Bain & Company.
As a marketing executive, Rishi has built world-class marketing organizations and capabilities that have driven top-line growth leveraging the right marketing technology, data, analytics and content strategy. Rishi has driven major brand and messaging transformations, reimagined digital customer experiences, and built and scaled go-to market models.
Rishi earned an MBA in Marketing from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as well as a BS in Chemical Engineering and an AB in Economics with Honors from Stanford University. 
 
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In this episode, we dive deep into the critical topic of self-deception and its profound impact on leadership and personal effectiveness. Mitch shares powerful insights on how self-deception can undermine our relationships and professional success, often without us even realizing it. He explains the concept of self-betrayal and how it leads to a distorted view of ourselves and others, creating unnecessary conflicts and reducing our influence as leaders. Mitch shares a valuable advice on how to rebuild trust in relationships damaged by self-deception and how to not let it happen again.
 
Mitch is the co-author of Arbinger's latest bestseller, The Outward Mindset. He writes frequently on the practical effects of mindset at the individual and organizational levels as well as the role of leadership in transforming organizational culture and results. He is an expert on mindset and culture change, leadership, strategy, performance management, organizational turnaround, and conflict resolution. 
 
Mitch is a sought-after speaker to organizations across a range of industries, bringing his practical experience to bear for leaders of corporations, governments, and organizations across the globe. Specific clients include NASA, Citrix, Aflac, the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Treasury Executive Institute, and Intermountain Healthcare. Mitch carries his first-hand perspective as a proven leader into his speeches and facilitation, dynamically bringing Arbinger's concepts and tools to life through his powerful stories and hands-on experience. His audiences leave inspired to improve and equipped with a practical roadmap to effect immediate change. 
 
In his role as managing partner, Mitch directs the development of Arbinger's intellectual property, training and consulting programs, and highly customized large-scale organizational change initiatives. He has been instrumental in Arbinger's rapid growth, including its expanding international presence in nearly 30 countries. 
 
Mitch received his B.A. in philosophy and is a licensed nursing administrator. Trained in fine art at the Art Students League and the National Academy, he spends much of his free time painting. His work hangs in organizations nationwide.
 
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Neri Karra Sillaman, entrepreneurship advisor at the University of Oxford and author of Pioneers: Eight Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs, discusses why immigrant-founded companies are disproportionately successful and tend to last longer than their counterparts. Drawing on her experience as a former child refugee and on research that began with her PhD, she explains how longevity is built through clear vision, perseverance, community, shared value, and disciplined decision-making.
She begins with the formative role of vision. At age eleven, while living in a refugee camp, education became her "north star." That clarity helped her interpret rejection not as failure but as "not yet," a mindset she later observed repeatedly among immigrant entrepreneurs. Clear intent, she argues, allows setbacks to redirect effort rather than extinguish it.
The conversation then turns to the principles she identified through interviews with immigrant founders of companies such as Chobani, Duolingo, WhatsApp, and Calendly. These include treating rejection as the beginning of negotiation, building community as a core operating system rather than a marketing tactic, and prioritizing shared value before profit. She emphasizes that many founders focus first on contributing to customers, suppliers, and local communities, with financial results following from that orientation.
Sillaman also explains how history and heritage function as assets rather than liabilities. Rather than discarding their past, immigrant entrepreneurs draw on cultural memory and lived experience to shape vision and execution in the present. This integration of past, present, and future becomes central to how long-lived businesses are built.
Another recurring theme is luck. She notes that founders consistently describe themselves as "lucky," but defines luck not as chance, but as a capability: being prepared enough to recognize opportunity and willing to act decisively when it appears.
The discussion also addresses technology and AI. As tools become more powerful, she argues, human creativity, judgment, and connection become more important, not less. She suggests that imperfections and visible signs of human authorship may increasingly signal authenticity in an automated environment.
Throughout the episode, Sillaman challenges dominant models of ego-centered leadership. She contrasts short-lived, personality-driven leadership with approaches that place attention on the work, the community served, and the legacy left behind. Longevity, she concludes, depends not only on how businesses grow, but on how they treat people and define the value they exist to create.
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This episode examines what happens when strategy is applied in environments where institutional stability, reliable data, and conventional partners cannot be assumed. Former McKinsey partner and University of Notre Dame Professor Emerita Viva Ona Bartkus draws on decades of experience across management consulting, academic research, and frontline fieldwork in conflict-affected regions to explain why many standard strategy doctrines collapse outside developed markets.
Bartkus reflects on her path through McKinsey, including what truly determines advancement inside elite professional services firms. She argues that early career performance is less about isolated brilliance and more about establishing trust, judgment, and reliability in the first months, when reputations are formed and remembered long after individual mistakes are forgiven.
The conversation then turns to "frontline environments," defined as regions typically far from international hubs, under-invested, and operating with weak formal institutions. Bartkus outlines why these areas, often ignored during recent decades of globalization, represent substantial economic opportunity when approached with rigor rather than optimism. She explains why traditional international expansion models, particularly reliance on single local partners, can introduce severe strategic and ethical risk.
Using concrete examples from Lebanon, West Africa, and rural Colombia, she details how broad-based partnerships, careful sequencing of investment, and disciplined listening are prerequisites for sustainable commercial activity. The discussion also addresses failure directly. Bartkus notes that more than half of frontline initiatives do not meet their objectives and explains how those failures sharpened her views on data verification, assumption testing, and understanding local motivations rather than projecting external logic.
The episode concludes with a broader argument on the role of business in post-conflict recovery. Aid and humanitarian efforts matter, but without durable economic activity and the dignity of work, recovery stalls. For senior leaders, investors, and strategists, this conversation offers a sober, experience-driven view of what strategy requires when conditions are uncertain and stakes are real.
Viva Ona Bartkus is Paul E. Purcell Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. She is a former partner at McKinsey & Company and the founder of the revolutionary course Business on the Frontlines.
 
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In this episode, Tim Koller, co-author of Valuation and a leading authority on corporate finance, offers a substantive examination of capital allocation decisions under real-world constraints. The discussion moves beyond theory to explore how CEOs and CFOs should approach resource deployment in mature, capital-rich companies—where investment opportunities are limited not due to lack of ambition but due to economic reality.
Key insights include:
- Share Buybacks as Rational Policy: Many firms undertaking significant buybacks—particularly in tech, life sciences, and consumer products—do so because they generate more cash than they can reinvest profitably. Koller argues that, in such cases, returning excess capital to shareholders is not a sign of strategic failure but of disciplined decision-making.
- The Fallacy of Diversification Without Advantage: Koller highlights repeated failures by capital-rich companies that expand into unrelated sectors to deploy cash, citing historical missteps in energy, utilities, and industrials. He emphasizes the need to assess whether the firm has a genuine competitive advantage before moving beyond its core business.
- Granular Leadership in Resource Allocation: Effective CEOs are directly engaged with capital allocation at the business-unit level. Delegating such decisions without maintaining enterprise-wide oversight often leads to underinvestment in high-return growth areas and misaligned incentives at the divisional level.
- The Perils of Uniform Cost-Cutting Mandates: Broad directives to improve margins often result in cuts to product development and customer experience—leading to long-term degradation despite short-term financial gains. Koller stresses the importance of distinguishing between cost efficiencies that enhance value and those that erode it.
- Timing and Judgment in Capital Deployment: In cyclical, capital-intensive sectors such as chemicals and energy, building capacity in sync with competitors can destroy value. Koller calls for contrarian timing, grounded in independent analysis, even when boards and markets are predisposed to follow the cycle.
Additional themes include the underuse of postmortems in capital projects, the misalignment between project planners and operators, and the distinction between executional and experimental failure. Throughout, Koller reiterates that sound capital allocation depends not only on financial modeling, but also on institutional learning, leadership judgment, and clarity of strategic intent.
This conversation offers practical, senior-level guidance for executives, board members, and investors who must navigate capital planning amid structural constraints, investor pressures, and organizational complexity.
 
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Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies
 
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