How the Metaverse Will Remake Your Strategy

As digital technologies move to the next stage of advancement—the metaverse—there are two questions companies should ask: How will the metaverse change our business? And how can we get ahead of the change and shape it to our advantage? This is our perspective on both.

The Organization of the Future Is Fractal

Scale isn’t dead. But it’s critical to find the right balance between scale and fractal principles—and to do it before your competitors do.

Organization Design Will Make or Break a Deal

Only about half of companies that undergo organization design during a post-merger integration say it was successful. Leaders can flip those odds by focusing on five imperatives.

The Strategic Race to Sustainability

To get beyond the starting line, CEOs need to approach the challenges of sustainability from a strategic and value-creation perspective in terms of both the questions they ask and the answers they seek.

Familiar Yet Fatal: 10 Common Pathologies of Failed Change Efforts

75% percent of ambitious change programs fail to capture long-term value. Despite these grim odds, globally, organizations spend $10 B annually on change management efforts. That is understandable in some ways — in our evolve-or-perish environment, organizations cannot afford to stay still. But more fundamentally, it suggests that organizations need to rethink the “tried and tested” approaches to change management. Our research suggests that change … [ Read more ]

How Boards Can Focus on What Matters in Sustainability

Boards are not carving out time for high-value strategic work when it comes to environmental, social, and governance. And that’s a problem for companies pushing for sustainability.

Sebastian Stange, Bjarte Bogsnes, Hardik Sheth

Traditional budgeting is like trying to square a circle, because the process tries to meet three ultimately incompatible objectives. First, budgeting sets targets to motivate and promote performance. These targets require directional and stretch goals. Second, budgeting provides forecasts of what lies ahead, but the forecasts only work if they are realistic, unbiased predictions. Production, for example, has to know what the expected sales are, … [ Read more ]

What AI Reveals About Trust in the World’s Largest Companies

BCG’s AI-based Trust Index enables companies to break down stakeholder perceptions of their trustworthiness. Analyses based on the Index have yielded valuable insights about what builds, sustains, or destroys trust.

Ten Lessons from 20 Years of Value Creation Insights

In 1998, BCG published its first Value Creators Report, which ranked the top corporations on the basis of the value they’d created over the previous five years and also attempted to draw out lessons from the winners. Since then, they have expanded their databases, refined their methodologies, and shared their perspectives annually. For the 20th report, they have now reassessed their cumulative experience and distilled … [ Read more ]

What Is Your Business Ecosystem Strategy?

Drawing on the insights gleaned from three years of ecosystem research, BCG offers a step-by-step framework for developing an incumbent company’s ecosystem strategy.

Measuring What Matters in Gender Diversity

How do you know if your company is making progress on gender diversity? This article discusses five areas where tracking metrics and data will help leaders know if they’re making wins—or falling short.

Martin Reeves, Jack Fuller

Companies often focus on executing one business model, and its associated targets and metrics become the main ways of judging success. But the dominance of such metrics can come at the expense of seeing possibilities and dabbling with new models. When there is a standard, clear way to measure and reward success, efforts in any other direction can look like failures or a waste of … [ Read more ]

Martin Reeves, Jack Fuller

Three types of surprise inspire imagination: anomalies (aspects in our information flow that are out of the ordinary); analogies (similarities we notice between concepts or experiences, which lead us to imagine new possibilities); and accidents (unexpected actions and consequences that draw our attention to something interesting).

When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t

Five key practices can unify leaders up, down, and across the organization—and spark concerted action.

How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation

A recent BCG study suggests that increasing the diversity of leadership teams leads to more and better innovation and improved financial performance. In both developing and developed economies, companies with above-average diversity on their leadership teams report a greater payoff from innovation and higher EBIT margins. Even more persuasive, companies can start generating gains with relatively small changes in the makeup of their senior teams. … [ Read more ]

How the Best Set Up Their Program Journey

Only a third of corporate transformations succeed, but two early decisions can help you buck the odds. A new BCG series, “Transformation Revisited,” shows how.

Fixing the Flawed Approach to Diversity

We recently surveyed roughly 16,500 people worldwide to identify the most effective diversity and inclusion measures. Our investigation builds on previous research into gender diversity. For our current analysis, we broadened our lens to include diversity in two additional dimensions: race and ethnicity and also sexual orientation. Through that research, we identified specific solutions that companies can implement to accelerate their progress on diversity.

The Art of Risk Management

We worry that in their headlong embrace of formal systems of risk management, many companies are pursuing a highly technical approach to risk management—characterized by complex financial models and elaborate, formal risk-management systems—in isolation from the day-to-day activities of the broader organization. The result is that risk management may exist as a formal function, but it is not really embedded in the “mindset” of the … [ Read more ]

How to Advance Gender Diversity in the Workplace

Gender diversity can be a profound business challenge —or a source of competitive advantage. But it’s not women who need to change. It’s the workplace.