1160 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field.

Content: Article | Authors: Erik Roth, Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

B2B purchasing decisions increasingly trace complex journeys, challenging the long-standing practices of many sales organizations.

Content: Article | Authors: Candace Lun Plotkin, Jennifer Stanley, Oskar Lingqvist | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

New data and better coordination can create value in the sales channel.

Content: Article | Authors: Parmeet Grover, Roland John | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

As digitization creates new cyberthreats, businesses should make security an integrated part of their IT infrastructure.

Content: Article | Authors: Allen Weinberg, Oliver Bossert, Wolf Richter | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

Meeting increasing global demand requires dramatically improving resource productivity. Yet technological advances mean companies have an extraordinary opportunity not only to meet that challenge but to spark the next industrial revolution as well.

Content: Article | Authors: Matt Rogers, Stefan Heck | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Management, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Today’s organizations were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply—they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization. As a result, there’s a mismatch between the pace of change in the external environment and the fastest possible pace of change at most organizations. If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many incumbents struggling to intercept the future.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

People are stuck between focus groups on the one hand and the Steve Jobs approach (“I will know what customers need before they know it themselves”) on the other. The Jobs way is compelling, but it’s risky. The challenge is the journey from today’s customer, whom most companies understand well, to tomorrow’s customer, whom they don’t.

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Marketing / Sales

Much of the song and dance called strategy in companies is really a resource-allocation process laced with pride. I have yet to see anybody say, “I understand my business is on the way down. I will give you $50 million cash back this year and the same again next year. I can see lots of good opportunities in the company for us to better use … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sven Smit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

I think we don’t pay enough attention to the difference between strategy as resource allocation and strategy as insight generation. There is a yearly strategy process, which focuses on resource allocation. We should acknowledge it as such and better understand its pathologies. But we also need to take a fresh look at how we identify ways to improve a firm’s positioning and performance, by explicitly … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael G. Jacobides | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

I disagree with the notion that the world is changing and that this has somehow made our established strategy tools obsolete. Most changes in the business environment have been in degree rather than kind: the speedier diffusion of technology, the growing intensity of competition as a result of internationalization, increased concern over business’s social and environmental responsibilities. Most of the core concepts and frameworks of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Organizational restructuring is no longer the answer—if it ever was—to the most difficult problems of shifting organizational focus. Indeed, the shape of the organization chart is less and less relevant to their solution.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Peters | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Given a realistic commitment to implementation, structural reorganization along functional or divisional lines has worked out successfully in many companies. This is to be expected, since the concepts of functional dominance and product-line autonomy are fair approximations of what actually goes on in functional and divisional organizations respectively. Indeed, in the latter case the structure often fits the basic strategy like a glove; hence its … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Peters | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

If you’re a leader, your whole reason for living is to help human beings develop—to really develop people and make work a place that’s energetic and exciting and a growth opportunity … You’re in the people-development business. If you take a leadership job, you do people. Period. It’s what you do. It’s what you’re paid to do. People, period. Should you have a great strategy? … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Peters | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Leadership

For any knowledge worker, even for the file clerk, there are two laws. The first one is that knowledge evaporates unless it’s used and augmented. Skill goes to sleep, it becomes rusty, but it can be restored and refurbished very quickly. That’s not true of knowledge. If knowledge isn’t challenged to grow, it disappears fast. It’s infinitely more perishable than any other resource we have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

Information, like electricity, is energy. Just as electrical energy is energy for mechanical tasks, information is energy for mental tasks.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Information, Knowledge

Psychology tells us that the one sure way to shut off all perception is to flood the senses with stimuli. That’s why the manager with reams of computer output on his desk is hopelessly uninformed. That’s why it’s so important to exploit the computer’s ability to give us only the information we want—nothing else. The question we must ask is not, “How many figures can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

We cannot put on the computer what we cannot quantify. And we cannot quantify what we cannot define. Many of the important things, the subjective things, are in this category. To know something, to really understand something important, one must look at it from 16 different angles. People are perceptually slow, and there is no shortcut to understanding; it takes a great deal of time. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

Amazon’s former head of global operations explains why the company was a natural place to apply lean principles, how they’ve worked in practice, and where the future could lead.

Content: Case Study, Multimedia Content | Author: Marc Onetto | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

Directors should spend a greater share of their time shaping an agenda for the future.

Content: Article | Authors: Christian Casal, Christian Caspar | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Corporate Governance

Directors report that they have a greater impact as they move beyond the basics.

Content: Article | Authors: Chinta Bhagat, Conor Kehoe | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Corporate Governance