1159 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

It’s extraordinarily important to know what is going to happen next month, what resources need to move, and what initiatives you have to launch. The problem is, that’s a different mode of thinking from strategy. As soon as you put strategy and planning together, planning will always win.

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Planning, Strategy

The age of the insular R&D organization is over. To serve as a company’s innovation engine, R&D strategy needs to be equipped for today’s fast-moving world.

Content: Article | Authors: Erik Roth, Joshua Katz, Philipp Ernst, Tom Brennan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

Professor Edward I. Altman of the Stern School of Business, New York University, is a leading expert in credit and debt. He has written or edited two dozen books and more than 160 articles on finance, accounting, and economics. He is also the creator of the Altman Z-Score, developed originally as a means of predicting bankruptcy probabilities. McKinsey researchers successfully used the Z-Score to test … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Edward I. Altman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Shortsighted solutions to recurring problems—antipatterns—often sabotage a company’s transformation.

Content: Article | Authors: Kartikeya Swami, Sven Blumberg, Thomas Delaet | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior

The first big test of strategy is: Does your strategy beat the market? And by that, what we really mean is, did you generate economic profit, which is the evidence that you overcame perfect markets? Because—and perhaps this is a scary flashback to your economics textbooks—in perfect markets there is no economic profit. The residual of market imperfections, or what we call competitive advantages, is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

There are many trade-offs that company managers struggle to make, in which neither a shareholder nor a stakeholder approach offers a clear path forward. This is especially true when it comes to issues affecting people who aren’t immediately involved with the company. These so-called externalities—perhaps most prominently, a company’s carbon emissions affecting parties that otherwise have no direct contact with the company—can be extremely challenging … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Marc H. Goedhart, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Companies need to balance rapidly changing consumer and market needs with relevant product experiences. Enter the strategic integrator.

Content: Article | Authors: Jeff Salazar, Rob Loughlin, Scott Woodruff | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Excellent CEOs form a small group of trusted colleagues to provide discreet, unfiltered advice—including the kind that hasn’t been asked for but is important to hear. They also stay in touch with how the work really gets done in the organization by getting out of boardrooms, conference centers, and corporate jets to spend time with rank-and-file employees. This is not only grounding for the CEO, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Corporate Governance

Exemplary CEOs combine the reality of what they ought to do in the role with who they are as human beings. They deliberately choose how to behave in the role, based on such questions as: What legacy do I want to leave? What do I want others to say about me as a leader? What do I stand for? What won’t I tolerate? CEOs answer … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management

Excellent CEOs increase their companies’ agility by determining which features of their organizational design will be stable and unchanging (such features might include a primary axis of organization, a few signature processes, and shared values) and by creating dynamic elements that adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities (such elements might include temporary performance cells, flow-to-work staffing models, and minimum-viable-product iterations).

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Vendors of workforce surveys like to say that employee engagement is the best measure of “soft stuff.” It’s not. While employee engagement indeed correlates with financial performance, a typical engagement survey covers less than 20 percent of the organizational-health elements that are proven to correlate with value creation. A proper assessment of organizational health takes in everything from alignment on direction and quality of execution … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Of the 50 most value-creating roles in any given organization, only 10 percent normally report to the CEO directly. Sixty percent are two levels below, and 10 percent sit farther down. Most surprising of all is that the remaining 10 percent are roles that don’t even exist. Once these roles are identified, the CEO can work with other executives to see that these roles are … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Succession Planning

Resource reallocation isn’t just a bold strategic move on its own; it’s also an essential enabler of the other strategic moves. Companies that reallocate more than 50 percent of their capital expenditures among business units over ten years create 50 percent more value than companies that reallocate more slowly.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

The secret of the helix lies in disaggregating the traditional management hierarchy into two separate, parallel lines of accountability—roughly equal in power and authority, but fundamentally different.

One of the two lines helps develop people and capabilities, sets standards for how work is done, and drives functional excellence; the other focuses those people and capabilities on the priorities for the business (including overseeing their day-to-day work), … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Kirsten Weerda, Sarah Kleinman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Yesterday’s data architecture can’t meet today’s need for speed, flexibility, and innovation. The key to a successful upgrade—and significant potential rewards—is agility.

Content: Article | Authors: Antonio Castro, Henning Soller, Jorge Machado, Matthias Roggendorf | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

The seller’s focus on three key interrelated activities—defining, marketing, and disentangling—can help expedite the transfer of divested assets and increase total deal value.

Content: Article | Authors: Anthony Luu, Jamie Koenig, Steve Miller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Historically, we’ve been disproportionately focused on the value of the cascade, the leader, change leaders. They’re still all very important. But, increasingly, as we are a workforce comprised of a generation that has a lot of their actions that are digitally based, we’ve had to come to grips with the idea that influencers and opinion leaders and people in the social network, their role modeling … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Schaninger | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Leadership, Organizational Behavior

When I recently joined the board of a public company, I asked them if they’ve looked at how an activist would attack them. If a company hasn’t, that tells me it’s not on their minds. What do you think the activists would be picking on? If management is not open to that alternative viewpoint, it’s not a good thing.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russell Fradin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Corporate Governance

A company needs to be really clear on why they’re acquiring something. If it’s an acqui-hire, then it’s the talent. If it’s a business-model acquisition, it’s the business, the technology, and the IP [intellectual property]. There are lots of different reasons. So first, be super clear on why you’re acquiring something. And then, I always like to say, there’s pitchers and catchers. The pitcher is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erik Roth | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

We’ve done a lot of research around what really makes for a high-performance innovation team. What we’ve found is that, if you go to Silicon Valley or Berlin or Singapore or Israel and look for the entrepreneurs—individual founders—they overweight slightly on the vision and the collaborations and underweight slightly on the execution and learning. But again, it depends on the individual.

But in a corporate environment, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erik Roth | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior