1160 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

The hallmark of financial performance in today’s digital age is an expanded ability to earn “rents” from intangibles. Profit per employee is one measure of these rents. ROIC is another. If a company boosts its profit per employee without increasing its capital intensity, management will increase its rents, just as raising ROIC above the cost of capital would. The difference is that viewing profit per … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Lowell Bryan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

At Intuit, founder Scott Cook developed what they call a culture of experimentation. As he put it, most decisions are based on “politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint,” and none of these “three Ps” are fully trustworthy. So Intuit bases decisions on experiments.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chip Heath, Scott Cook | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Decision Making

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the Darden School, at the University of Virginia, has researched the differences between how entrepreneurs and very good senior managers at Fortune 500 firms think. She gives them a scenario about a new-product introduction. The typical Fortune 500 manager will run projections from the market data. But the entrepreneur says, “I don’t trust the data. I’d find a customer and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chip Heath, Saras Sarasvathy | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management, Trends / Analysis

Success in the software industry has long been influenced, and often driven, by the ecosystem of developers, plug-ins, software-development kits and application-programming interfaces (APIs), and add-ons that drive added value and increase stickiness for products. Similarly, companies in other industries need to think expansively and include upstream suppliers as well as downstream vendors or consumers, and focus on how each part of the value chain … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Hugo Sarrazin, Johnson Sikes | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Business Rules, Strategy

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Time Management

A Harvard Business School professor reflects on what she has learned from senior executives about the unique value that strategic leaders can bring to their companies.

Content: Article | Author: Cynthia A. Montgomery | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

The first question for organizations exploring multiple supply chains is how many are needed. Answering it requires a close look at the way the supply chain assets that a company uses to manufacture and distribute its products matches up against the strategic aspirations it has for those products and their customers.

This requirement seems obvious, but in practice most companies examine only the second half of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alex Niemeyer, Brian Ruwadi, Yogesh Malik | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

The largest companies eventually find size itself an impediment to creating new value. They must recognize that not all forms of growth are equal.

Content: Article | Authors: Jean-Hugues J. Monier, Nicholas F. Lawler, Robert S. McNish | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Management

Getting there means ditching today’s monolithic model in favor of splintered supply chains that dismantle complexity, and using manufacturing networks to hedge uncertainty.

Content: Article | Authors: Alex Niemeyer, Brian Ruwadi, Yogesh Malik | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

Customers are demanding very different kinds of relationships with companies. Here are some ways to jump-start customer engagement across your organization.

Content: Article | Authors: Laura LaBerge, Paul Magill, Tom French | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

Many of the managerial tactics used by companies in their capital-allocation and evaluation processes fail to take note of basic [behavioral biases]. By considering the success or failure of projects in isolation, for example, they fail to understand how each will add risk to the company’s overall portfolio and institutionalize a tendency toward risk aversion, essentially recreating the narrow framing that occurs at the individual … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Dan P. Lovallo, Tim Koller, Zane D. Williams | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Risk Management

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You don’t need a formal strategy role to help shape your organization’s strategic direction. Start by moving beyond frameworks and communicating in a more engaging way.

Content: Article | Authors: Jayanti Kar, Michael Birshan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

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Manufacturers can generate new value, minimize costs, and increase operational stability by focusing on four broad areas: production, product design, value recovery, and supply-circle management.

Content: Article | Authors: Helga Vanthournout, Ken Somers, Stephan Mohr, Steven Swartz | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Operations, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Companies must cultivate leaders for global markets. Dispelling five common myths about globalization is a good place to start.

Content: Article | Author: Pankaj Ghemawat | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: International, Leadership

The structures, processes, and communications approaches of many far-flung businesses have been stretched to the breaking point. Here are some ideas for relieving the strains.

Content: Article | Authors: Leigh Weiss, Suzanne Heywood, Toby Gibbs | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior

As the economic spotlight shifts to developing markets, global companies need new ways to manage their strategies, people, costs, and risks.

Content: Article | Authors: Jonathan Harris, Martin Dewhurst, Suzanne Heywood | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: International

A premium multiple is hard to come by and harder to keep. Executives should worry more about improving performance.

Content: Article | Authors: Anand Mehta, Susan Nolen Foushee, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

You can’t spend wisely unless you understand marketing’s full impact. Here are five questions executives should ask to help maximize the bang for their bucks.

Content: Article | Authors: David Court, Jesko Perrey, Jonathan Gordon | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales