Reshaping Business Education in a New Era
Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, discusses how the expectations of MBA students are changing—and why the traditional MBA education needs to change as well.
Content: Prospective MBA Content | Author: Blair Sheppard | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: About the MBA Degree
How Companies Approach Innovation: A McKinsey Global Survey
Executives say innovation is very important, but their companies’ approach to it is often informal, and leaders lack confidence in their innovation decisions. Top managers and other professionals agree that the biggest challenge is talent but disagree on why. Nonetheless, executives agree on some steps to improve innovation.
Content: Article | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation
Don Sull
There are three different ways frms are agile. They can be agile within their operations. That’s kind of the Toyota story or the Southwest Air story; a clearly defned industry. You’re constantly spotting and seizing opportunities quicker than your rivals.
The second way is through portfolio agility. You can pull resources from slower declining businesses and put them against faster growing or more promising opportunities.
A third … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Donald Sull | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management
Assessing Innovation Metrics: McKinsey Global Survey Results
A recent McKinsey Global Survey shows that companies are satisfied, overall, with their use of metrics to assess innovation portfolios – though many findings suggest that they shouldn’t be. The companies that get the highest returns from innovation do use metrics well; these organizations tend to assess innovation more comprehensively than the others.
Content: Article | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Innovation
MACS: The Market-Activated Corporate Strategy Framework
How should a corporation decide whether to buy, sell, or keep a business unit? In the late 1980s, McKinsey developed its market-activated corporate strategy (MACS) framework, which answered that question in a surprising way. The obvious considerations—the attractiveness of the industry in which the unit competes and its competitiveness within that industry—are both relevant, but the acid test is which company can extract the greatest … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: John Stuckey, Ken McLeod | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Linking Employee Benefits to Talent Management
Most companies treat benefits as a cost of doing business. They should see them instead as a competitive weapon.
Content: Article | Authors: Drew Ungerman, James Kalamas, Paul D. Mango | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Management
Flaws in Strategic Decision Making: McKinsey Global Survey Results
Irrational thinking doesn’t just affect individual economic decisions; it affects corporate strategic planning as well. These results highlight the practices of companies that have made successful strategic decisions—and also reveal what the same companies have gotten wrong.
Content: Article | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Best Practices, Strategy
A Fresh Look at Strategy Under Uncertainty: An Interview
Although even the highest levels of uncertainty don’t prevent businesses from analyzing predicaments rationally, says author Hugh Courtney, the financial crisis has shown us the limits of our tools—and minds.
Content: Thought Leader | Author: Hugh Courtney | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Opening Up to Investors
Executives need to embrace transparency if they want to help investors make investment decisions. But what should be disclosed?
Content: Article | Authors: Robert N. Palter, Werner Rehm | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance
Cascading Risks
Taking improbable events seriously: An interview with the author of The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, explains why the rarity and unpredictability of certain events does not make them unimportant.
Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Allen Webb, Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Source: McKinsey Quarterly
The ethanol challenge for the United States
IT architecture: Cutting Costs and Complexity
A joint effort by IT and business leaders can help companies not only to save money but also to prepare for the return of growth.
Content: Article | Authors: Helge Buckow, Janaki Akella, Stéphane Rey | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business
Managing Your Business as if Customer Segments Matter
As customers’ needs fragment, marketers must develop common, actionable segmentations and integrate segment-level goals into planning and performance-management processes.
Content: Article | Authors: Marc Singer, Peter W. Dahlström, Sean R. Collins | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
Diana Farrell, Terra Terwilliger, and Allen P. Webb
MGI’s research suggests that to foster innovation rather than merely spawn systems that are quickly imitated or promote the wrong goals, companies should focus on two priorities. The first is to identify the productivity levers offering the greatest opportunity for competitive differentiation: targeting the few specific levers that could well create a competitive advantage produces results more reliably than striving for improvement everywhere. The most … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Allen P. Webb, Diana Farrell, Terra Terwilliger | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business
The Real Power of Real Options
While option-pricing models are a superior valuation tool – the purpose to which the theory is generally put – real options can provide a systematic framework that will also serve as a strategic tool, and that it is in this strategic application that the real power of real options lies.
It is just such a framework that this article seeks to provide. We begin by … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Keith Leslie, Max P. Michaels | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance
Strategy Under Uncertainty
The traditional approach to strategy requires precise predictions and thus often leads executives to underestimate uncertainty. This can be downright dangerous. A four-level framework can help.
Content: Article | Authors: Hugh Courtney, Jane Kirkland, Patrick Viguerie | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Organizing for Value
When large companies are organized in the traditional division structure, strategic decisions too often fall to managers under pressure to meet budgetary demands. Success in one unit masks underperformance in others, while ventures that promise strong future growth go underfunded because they don’t contribute to short-term bottom-line numbers.
One way to shake things up is to review the strategy and performance-management processes and to make decisions … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Felix Wenger, Massimo Giordano | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy
A Better Way to Understand TRS
Executives, board members, the press, and investors regularly look at total returns to shareholders (TRS) as an important metric of value creation. Yet TRS, like any performance metric, is instructive only when users understand its components. Breaking the metric into four fundamental parts offers a better view.
Content: Article | Authors: Ankur Agrawal, Bas Deelder, Marc H. Goedhart | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Finance
Enduring Ideas: The Business System
In this interactive presentation—one in a series of multimedia frameworks—McKinsey alumnus Kevin Coyne describes how companies can use the business system to evaluate their choices at each stage in the process of creating and delivering products. Aligning conduct at every step with the company’s value proposition creates a truly integrated business strategy.
Content: Article | Author: Kevin Coyne | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Strategy