1160 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and psychologist Gary Klein debate the power and perils of intuition for senior executives.

Content: Article | Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Trust your gut instincts—but only when four tests have been met.

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can not only make themselves more agile and productive but also accelerate revenue growth.

Content: Article | Author: David C. Edelman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

Assessing its impact as well as its volume will help companies take better advantage of buzz.

Content: Article | Authors: Jacques Bughin, Jonathan Doogan, Ole Jørgen Vetvik | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Plotting the structure of industries across markets and geographies reveals a startling and increasing inequality in size and performance among even the largest companies.

What emerges is a “power curve” pattern characterized by a short “head,” comprising a few companies with extremely large incomes, and quickly dropping off to a long “tail” of significantly smaller competitors.

These power curves can be a useful diagnostic tool for understanding … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michele Zanini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

McKinsey research identifies six management practices used by companies with high-performing supply chains, including segmenting supply chains to get control of complexity, applying lean tools, and tailoring supply networks to optimize service and costs. The findings have implications for executives in high tech, manufacturing and assembly, pharmaceutical, and retail industries.

Content: Article | Authors: Brian D. Ruwadi, Bruce Constantine, Joshua Wine | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

Consumers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should.

Content: Article | Authors: Dave Elzinga, David Court, Ole Jørgen Vetvik, Susan Mulder | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

The economic slump offers business leaders a chance to more effectively reward talented employees by emphasizing nonfinancial motivators rather than bonuses. A recent McKinsey survey indicates that executives find some nonmonetary rewards motivate employees better than cash bonuses do. See what they are, then let us know what’s working in your organization.

Content: Article | Authors: Elizabeth Mohr, Martin Dewhurst, Matthew Guthridge | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Risk-assessment processes typically expose only the most direct threats facing a company and neglect indirect ones that can have an equal or greater impact.

Content: Article | Authors: Eric Lamarre, Martin Pergler | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Risk Management

A good architecture has a number of important characteristics. It is modular, allowing sections to be tagged, stored, and applied in different products. It is built on standards, providing for easier integration. It is configurable, letting one system serve many customer requirements. And it is updatable, allowing new features to be implemented without any need to discard large parts of older releases.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Juergen Reiner, Marcus Schaper | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

Many companies try to change themselves by benchmarking other organizations and borrowing their procedures or practices. The irony of benchmarking is that we’re essentially telling organizations to be more like GE or Apple or Nike. As Dev Patnaik, the author of Wired to Care, said to me one time, we know this doesn’t work on a personal level: we resist when members of our families … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chip Heath | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Change Management

Jim March says there are two very different kinds of logic for making decisions. One is the logic of consequences. We’re great in business at changing behavior by changing consequences. If we want customers to buy more, we lower prices. If we want salespeople to sell more, we increase their bonuses. But the second kind of logic is the logic of identity. Many of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chip Heath, Jim March | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Leadership, Management, Motivation

Lucky risk takers use hindsight to reinforce their feeling that their gut is very wise. Hindsight also reinforces others’ trust in that individual’s gut. That’s one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence. We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Kahneman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Confidence, Decision Making, Leadership, Organizational Behavior

As products evolve into commodities, services become more important. But companies that play this new game must understand its rules.

Content: Article | Authors: Byron G. Auguste, Eric P. Harmon, Vivek Pandit | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Designing a manufacturing network entails devising and managing flows of innovation and know-how—not just determining what to produce and where—and organizing the resulting logistics flows.

Content: Article | Authors: Ann Vereecke, Arnoud De Meyer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Operations

Although most companies realize that business units and the technology organization must be much more integrated, many don’t know how to make this happen. Leaders of business units sometimes have only a vague sense of technology’s value, while technology executives often fail to address issues in terms that businesspeople find meaningful. In an imaginary memo to a CEO, a chief technology officer proposes a solution: … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Driek Desmet, Tor Mesøy | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

In this interactive presentation, McKinsey director Lowell Bryan talks about the origins of the portfolio-of-initiatives framework. Developed to address the need for strategy in a more fluid, less predictable environment, this approach treats strategies as actions that require continual monitoring and evaluation.

Content: Article | Author: Lowell Bryan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Companies can seize the opportunity in mergers by involving employees and customers in the integration process, retaining critical staff, generating momentum by quickly winning key accounts, and serving the right customers in the right way.

Content: Article | Authors: Ajay Gupta, Andy West, Tom Stephenson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Mergers & Acquisitions

In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—Steve Coley, a director emeritus in McKinsey’s Chicago office, describes the three horizons framework. Based on research into how companies sustain growth, this approach illustrates how to manage for current performance while maximizing future opportunities for growth.

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

Most change programs fail, but the odds of success can be greatly improved by taking into account these counter-intuitive insights about how employees interpret their environment and choose to act.

Content: Article | Authors: Carolyn Aiken, Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Change Management