McKinsey and BCG MENA partners selected as WEF Young Global Leaders

McKinsey and BCG consultants Rima Assi and Lisa Ivers have been added to the World Economic Forum’s elite Young Global Leaders list for 2019.

Two of the big MBB strategy and management firms have seen their star consultants in the Middle East & North Africa selected to this year’s crop of Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum; senior partner Rima Assi from McKinsey & Company’s Abu Dhabi office, and Lisa Ivers, Boston Consulting Group partner and managing director in the firm’s Casablanca branch in Morocco.

Joining Bain & Company Australia partner Lucy d’Arville as the only big-name consultancy representatives for this year’s intake, which is comprised of a diverse range of the world’s most promising social activists, business leaders, public servants, artists and technologists under the age of 40, Assi and Ivers will now partake in a five-year programme aimed at advancing new models of innovation to bring about change in the communities they represent.

“We look to these leaders to take forward the challenge of improving the state of the world,” said WEF head of the Young Global Leaders forum Mariah Levin, herself a former manager and public sector consultant at KPMG in Canada. “In offering opportunities and experiences to transform their understanding of the possibilities presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are investing in them to drive a future where we all can flourish.”With their nomination to the Forum of Young Global Leaders, the pair now share a number of life parallels, both graduates of France’s elite HEC international business school – Assi with a Masters’ in economics in 2004 and Ivers with an MBA in 2005 – before joining the two biggest names in the global consulting world in 2006 via French financial institutions and becoming senior consulting leaders in the MENA region since.

McKinsey’s Assi joined the firm after two years in the risk control department of Société Générale in France and now specialises in strategic risk management and financial restructuring from her base in Abu Dhabi, while Ivers came to BCG in Paris via a strategic analysist role with BNP Paribas in Sydney, ultimately moving to Morocco four years later to help establish the firm’s office in Casablanca (which recently welcomed its fourth partner Othman Omary).

“We are delighted to announce that Rima Assi, a McKinsey Middle East partner, has been selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s 127 2019 Young Global Leaders,” McKinsey said in a Facebook post. “Rima has been at the center of some of the Middle East’s most significant social and economic transformations, and she is a tireless champion for empowering women and driving diversity and inclusion in the workplace.”

Among others worldwide, Assi and Ivers join local active Young Global Leader colleagues Gassan Al-Kibsi, McKinsey’s managing partner for the Middle East who leads a team of 50-plus partners and more than 800 professionals across the region, and BCG’s Leila Hoteit, a managing director for the firm in the Middle East who was last year named by Forbes Magazine as among the 100 most influential women in the region.

Also on list as notable inclusions for 2019: Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, the youngest serving president for over a century, along with Georgia’s Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze and Juan Guaidó, Venzuala’s president-in-waiting; and from the Middle East; Sarah bint Yousif Al-Amiri, UAE Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, who also serves as the deputy director of the Emirates Mars Mission.