1160 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

As executives become more senior, they are less likely to receive constructive performance and strategic feedback. They can get it by calling on their junior colleagues.

Content: Article | Author: Robert S. Kaplan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

Shake up your thinking by looking at the world from the perspective of a particular country, industry, or company. “Rooted” maps can help you unearth hidden opportunities and threats.

Content: Article | Author: Pankaj Ghemawat | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Most sales reps spend less than half of their time actually selling. Here’s how companies can reshape sales operations to allow them to focus on their real job.

Content: Article | Authors: Jennifer Wickland, Olivia Nottebohm, Tom Stephenson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Beneath the surface of most companies are three kinds of businesses—a customer relationship business, a product innovation business, and an infrastructure business. Although organizationally intertwined, these businesses differ a great deal. …These three businesses rarely map neatly to a corporation’s organizational structure. Rather, they correspond to what are popularly called “core processes”—the cross-functional work flows that stretch from suppliers to customers and, in combination, define … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: John Hagel III, Marc Singer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

Tacit interactions are becoming central to economic activity. Making those who undertake them more effective isn’t like tweaking a production line.

Content: Article | Authors: Bradford C. Johnson, James Manyika, Scott C. Beardsley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Downsizing all parts of a company equally may seem fair, but it doesn’t make sense. Targeted cuts and capability-building efforts do.

Content: Article | Authors: Dennis Layton, Risto Penttinen, Suzanne Heywood | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Bad strategy abounds, says UCLA management professor Richard Rumelt. Senior executives who can spot it stand a much better chance of creating good strategies.

Content: Article | Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Identifying and understanding important individual investors can help corporate executives predict the direction of share prices.

Content: Article | Authors: Jonathan W. Witter, Kevin P. Coyne | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

Successful companies inevitably face that prospect. The only real question is how.

Content: Article | Authors: Bin Jiang, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Industry Specific

Companies advance myriad strategies for creating value with acquisitions—but only a handful are likely to do so.

Content: Article | Authors: David Wessels, Marc H. Goedhart, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

Senior managers can apply practical insights from neuroscience to make themselves—and their teams—more creative.

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Howe, Marla M. Capozzi, Renée Dye | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Management

Most attempts at brainstorming are doomed. To generate better ideas—and boost the odds that your organization will act on them—start by asking better questions.

Content: Article | Authors: Kevin P. Coyne, Shawn T. Coyne | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Training programs generate greater value for organizations when the curricula reflect key business performance metrics. Testing real-world outcomes is crucial.

Content: Case Study | Authors: Jenny Cermak, Monica McGurk | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Human Resources | Company: Boys & Girls Club of America (BGCA)

They can be a powerful business tool—but only if you get the design right.

Content: Article | Author: John Horn | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

Companies should start any cost-cutting initiative by thinking through whether they could restructure the business to take advantage of current and projected marketplace trends (for instance, by exiting relatively low-profit or low-growth businesses) or to mitigate threats, such as consolidating competitors. An important part of the analysis is to understand a company’s financial situation and the range of potential outcomes under a number of different … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Dennis Layton, Risto Penttinen, Suzanne Heywood | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

The finance chief is often well placed to guard against common decision-making biases.

Content: Article | Authors: Bill Huyett, Olivier Sibony, Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

We found that the performance of companies in relatively tacit-interactive sectors varied far more than that of other companies. The level of performance variability (defined as the standard deviation of performance divided by the mean level of performance) was 0.9 for companies in sectors with a low level of tacit interactions. Among companies in sectors with a middling number of tacit interactions it was 5.5, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bradford C. Johnson, James Manyika, Scott C. Beardsley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Managing for effectiveness in what economists call tacit interactions—the searching, coordinating, and monitoring activities required to exchange goods, services, and information—is about fostering change, learning, collaboration, shared values, and innovation. Workers engage in a larger number of higher-quality tacit interactions when organizational barriers (such as hierarchies and silos) don’t get in the way, when people trust each other and have the confidence to organize themselves, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bradford C. Johnson, James Manyika, Scott C. Beardsley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

Knowledge workers’ information needs vary. The key to better productivity is applying technology more precisely.

Content: Article | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Knowledge Management

Badly judged centralization can stifle initiative, constrain the ability to tailor products and services locally, and burden business divisions with high costs and poor service. Insufficient centralization can deny business units the economies of scale or coordinated strategies needed to win global customers or outperform rivals.

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy