McKinsey Partner Considers Ever-Changing Risk Landscape at UVA Darden

If Eric Chewning (MBA ’08) had been in a course considering the role of global corporations and related government affairs while finishing up his MBA at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in 2008, the dominant theme would likely have been the steady march of globalization accompanied by the largely accepted wisdom that mutual economic dependence would go hand in hand with more global cooperation, he said.

Speaking to Darden students in late February on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Chewning noted that history does not always unfold as planned.

A former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Chewning has had a front row seat to historical shifts in the past decade. Now a McKinsey & Co. partner co-leading the firm’s aerospace and defense practice in the Americas, Chewning’s extensive resume in the public and private sector includes leadership roles at Morgan Stanley, Booz & Co., chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense and as deputy assistant secretary for industrial policy at the U.S. Department of Defense. The latter being the job at the department that “handles all the business-related topics,” Chewning said, leading antitrust reviews and representing the Department of Defense on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, among other roles.

In Charlottesville to help lead a session of Professor Alan Beckenstein’s “Business-Government Relations” class, Chewning, who was a William Michael Shermet Award recipient at Darden, also led a session on how the confluence of national security considerations and economics is impacting global business with members of the Darden Military Association as part of the group’s Veterans Week.

“This is a Top 3 issue for every CEO of a global company,” said Chewning.

In addition to unpacking a series of course readings involving the intersection of governance and global business, Chewning shared 10 articles from the Financial Times, all culled from recent days, with headlines on topics such as regulatory interventions; retaliatory energy action; and exogenous pressures leading to investor uncertainty across the globe. The point, Chewning said, is that events of immense global importance are happening at this very moment, and considerations of corporate and government risk require near constant refreshing.

“If you’re managing the business the way you were managing five, six or 10 years ago, you’re wrong. The landscape has changed and key assumptions are different now,” said Chewning. “Strategy is an ongoing iterative process, and your risk frameworks need to be too.”

Chewning reminded students they would also be working and leading in a world in which the model of stakeholder capitalism was ascendant, and their decisions would need to account for the impact on shareholders, communities, employees and the public sector.

“The hard part comes when you have to prioritize different stakeholders,” said Chewning, adding that a well understood corporate narrative with clearly defined values could provide an effective “organizing principle” in those prioritization decisions.