1159 Posts found for Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Every business does some customer analysis. That’s a truism, but what I think is missing is a systematic, structured audit that consists of a set of foundational analyses that leave nowhere to hide, and that allows you to understand at a very deep level how customers are behaving.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Ross | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

Narcissism. Overconfidence. Low EQ. Why do we persist in selecting for leadership traits that hamper organizational progress—and leave the right potential leaders in the wrong roles?

Content: Article | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Leadership, Organizational Behavior

Yes, organizational health still drives long-term performance—but the way leaders measure and diagnose health should change, new research shows.

Content: Article | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Lucia Rahilly | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Psychologists have identified more than 60 cognitive biases that affect how people make decisions. We boiled them down into four groups: group think; confirmation bias; loss aversion, which leads us to put more weight on losses than gains; and anchoring or inertia—anchoring decisions in what we did in the past.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Public companies are often not set up for innovation, partly because their compensation systems tend to be short-term-oriented and because the boards aren’t deeply enough involved in innovation. […] We’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the past 20 years, but a lot of it has come from younger, newer companies. Despite all the talent, capital, and customer knowl­edge established corporations have, there … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

Many perceive the markets as short-term oriented, forcing management to worry only about quarterly earnings. Our research shows that successful companies are typically those with longer-term horizons. There are plenty of investors who have long-term horizons as well, but they generally need to talk to a company only once or twice a year to make their decisions. Short-term investors are noisier. They probably drive the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Value creation comes from revenue growth and return on capital, which drive cash flows.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance

In a famous social-science experiment conducted in 1946 by psychologist Solomon Asch, participants were given one of two sentences. The first began, “Steve is smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous.” The second read, “Steve is jealous, impulsive, critical, diligent, and smart.” Although both sentences contained the same information, the first one led with positive traits while the second one started with negatives. When asked to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior

All CEOs need to ask themselves, “What do you want to be remembered for—as a great person or a person who made the company great?” If you want to make the company great, then you must think about the company first, yourself second. It’s human nature to want to be recognized, so it’s not easy to put the institution ahead of yourself.

Content: Quotation | Author: Roberto Setúba | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is grabbing a lot of headlines, but let’s look beyond the latest debates to understand some labor market dynamics that can help employers hire and retain talent to meet business needs. New research from the McKinsey Global Institute compares women’s and men’s work experiences to better understand the tough trade-offs at play in the world of work.

Content: Article | Author: Kweilin Ellingrud | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Women in Business

Too often, business initiatives get mired in bureaucracy, overconfidence, and lack of ownership. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Andrew McAfee explores reasons for the dysfunction—and how to fix it.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Andrew McAfee, Raju Narisetti | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior

The disruptive premise of Web3 is built on three fundamentals: the blockchain that stores all data on asset ownership and the history of conducted transactions; “smart” contracts that represent application logic and can execute specific tasks independently; and digital assets that can represent anything of value and engage with smart contracts to become “programmable.” Each of these three fundamentals has layers of complexity and nuance, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Anutosh Banerjee, Ian De Bode, Matt Higginson, Robert Byrne | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

Stephen Covey used to talk about your circle of influence, and Buffett talks about your circle of competence. Macro things are not things that start-ups can impact or control. So there’s not much reason for them to affect your thoughts about whether you would start a company or not. They might add anxiety, but I don’t know that they have any real impact.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Gurley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Entrepreneurship

I hate the 5 to 10 percent layoffs. You don’t get any material impact to lowering your expenses. Yet you get all the cultural negatives of having done a layoff. You get 100 percent of the pain and very little gain. And then you’re in retweet land—you end up with two or three of them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Gurley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Human Resources

Thinking about failure means going back to root causes. Most often, my failures stem from one of two places: a blind spot that I had or a comfort zone that I was in. I either didn’t see something, or I assumed something that wasn’t the right assumption. And those eventually lead to some form of failure.

It’s good to be constantly aware of your blind spots … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank D’Souza | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

Product management has experienced at least two significant waves of change in the last couple of decades. The first wave was the shift from on-prem infrastructure to cloud, which allowed product managers to shift from requirement-getters to product visionaries developing minimum viable products.

The second wave was driven by the consumerization of technology, which led PMs to be more anchored in design thinking, make data-driven product … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Harrysson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Management

McKinsey findings bolster the case for programmatic M&A. But beyond doing more deals, what gives programmatic acquirers an edge—and how does their dealmaking translate to value creation?

Content: Article | Authors: Frederyk Schroeder, Jeff Rudnicki, Mieke Van Oostende, Tobias Lundberg | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

Performance management systems help people continuously develop—but most companies fall short of best practices. A set of defined design choices can help guide leaders forward.

Content: Article | Authors: Amaia Noguera Lasa, Andrea Pedroni, Asmus Komm, Simon Gallot Lavallée | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

We all want possibility, transformation, change, and innovation, but the only way to get to that is through uncertainty. If we want those things, we need to get better at navigating uncertainty as individual leaders, as teams, and as organizations. Organizations need to ask themselves, “Do we have the ability to face uncertainty? What is our uncertainty ability?” I believe uncertainty ability is like a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Great leaders challenge their organizations. They see the opportunity that uncertainty creates to learn quickly, to do new things. But they also, on the other hand, support their people and pay attention to the anxiety that uncertainty creates. Great leaders create a rich soil to sustain their people.

Content: Quotation | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Leadership