Let’s face it. Our hyper-dynamic, hyper-competitive and hyper-connected world has become a breeding ground for hyper-advice. Over 10,000 business books appear annually (and that doesn’t count the thousands of articles, blog posts, podcasts and video lectures produced). Search the internet for how to motivate employees
and hundreds of thousands of results emerge in roughly half a second!
So, why are we at McKinsey & Company launching a weekly blog that risks simply adding to the clutter? We are hopeful that our weekly Insights on Leadership & Organization
will be a one-stop shop where leaders can find impactful, fact-based and pragmatic advice – in 600 words or less.
We don’t want this to be run-of-the-mill head-nodding material. All up, as a firm we invest over $400 million annually in knowledge development, and we want you to benefit from that investment by providing genuinely provocative ideas that recalibrate and expand your thinking. Then we want to do that again. And again.
For this blog, we will address a range of both timely and timeless topics related to leading organizations and that apply to every leader, whether you’re a leader in an investment bank or a not-for-profit. Or whether you’re in India or Indiana. Over time, we will explore four principal areas:
- Increasing organizational agility to effectively adapt to and shape market changes with speed. This requires organizations to master the paradox of being nimble in innovating and executing rapidly, while at the same time capturing the benefits of stability and harnessing the virtues of size and consistency.
- Converting talent to value by combining traditional methods with advanced analytics-based methods to forecast talent supply and demand based on the business strategy; and improving how needed talent is identified, attracted, placed, developed, evaluated and retained—all the way from the front line to the C-suite.
- Managing culture and change to deliver sustainable results and create lasting competitive advantage. This includes the tools and methods to overcome the digital, customer-centric, simplification, risk management, and numerous other large-scale transformation challenges that today’s global enterprises face.
- Maximizing merger impact by building M&A capability to be ready to make the right deals happen—and then, once one does, developing and executing the right master plan related to governance, sources of value, organization, talent, capability building, and cultural and technology alignment.
Put simply, our goal is to help leaders lead better so, in turn, their organizations will be more successful and their employees’ experiences more meaningful and fulfilling.
Thanks for reading. We look forward to sharing more in the weeks and months to come.