Senior executives will better balance people and priorities by embracing the paradoxes of organizational life. I often ask business leaders three simple questions. What are your company’s ten most exciting value-creation opportunities? Who are your ten best people? How many of your ten best people are working on your ten most exciting opportunities? It’s a rough […]

Big data could transform the health-care sector, but the industry must undergo fundamental changes before stakeholders can capture its full value. A big-data revolution is under way in health care. Start with the vastly increased supply of information. Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies have been aggregating years of research and development data into medical databases,

Dynamic domestic players and focused multinationals are helping China churn out a growing number of innovative products and services. Intensifying competition lies ahead; here’s a road map for navigating it. China is innovating. Some of its achievements are visible: a doubling of the global percentage of patents granted to Chinese inventors since 2005, for example, and

Looming imbalances in global labor pools could make it harder for some companies to find enough skilled workers and for some less-skilled workers to find jobs. Technological advances, industrialization, and liberalized trade have created a staggering 900 million nonfarm jobs in developing countries since 1980, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. As global

Winning the $30 trillion decathlon: How to succeed in emerging markets

The region’s future prosperity depends on its youth. Governments must ensure that young people have the right skills for the jobs being created. The Arab world is experiencing unprecedented turmoil. Any evaluation of its root causes would include unemployment for youth between the ages of 15 and 24. More than 25 percent of youth in the

Women continue to be underrepresented at senior-management levels in Asia, Europe, and North America. McKinsey research suggests some answers. The progress of women toward the upper echelons of business, government, and academia continues to provoke media attention and lively debate. Look, for instance, at the coverage of Marissa Mayer’s July appointment as CEO of Yahoo! and

The year ahead could be a time of significant change for everything from banks, retailers, and infrastructure projects to pork prices, soccer, and “compulsory” vacation time. How might China surprise us in 2013? Read the ten predictions of Gordon Orr, a McKinsey director based in Shanghai, and tell us what you would add. 1. Banks

IT and business executives need to apply a risk-management approach that balances economic value against risks. The use of highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms—known as cloud computing—is growing rapidly. Adopters are driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money. Large institutions are building and managing

The single-largest business opportunity in Africa will be its rising consumer market. A McKinsey report, one of the first of its kind, offers a detailed profile of African consumers, including their demographics, behavior, and needs. By now, most investors and businesses know about the tremendous potential of Africa—the world’s second-fastest-growing region, topped only by emerging Asia.

To get products to customers in emerging markets, global manufacturers need strategies for navigating both the traditional and the modern retail landscapes. In emerging markets the world over, multinationals struggling to get their products to consumers confront a bewildering kaleidoscope of strategic and operational challenges. At one extreme, they must grapple with traditional retailers: the chaotic

Companies whose social investments focus on women in developing economies help not only the recipients but also themselves. Few companies make social investments specifically aimed at empowering women in developing economies, but we believe that supporting this goal is good business and good practice for all companies. In the course of our work, we’ve uncovered a startlingly

A rebound signals opportunity—and a need for flexibility as the market evolves. While the private-equity business remains in the doldrums in much of the world, the Asia–Pacific region stands out as an exception. A recent McKinsey report, Private equity Asia–Pacific: Is the boom back?, shows that in 2011, Asia was the world’s only major region where these

The CEO of a global staffing firm and a Nobel laureate economist discuss the changing face of US employment and the obstacles to job creation. The US economy has lost seven million jobs since 2007 and remains in the grip of a weak and largely jobless recovery that could take five more years to restore prerecession

Montreal’s M0851 leather goods stores uses its own cultivated identity to sell its ‘slow fashions’ Frédéric Mamarbachi, founder and creator of the brand M0851, is as excited as a kid in an ice cream store when he looks at three-dimensional renderings for his next leather-goods store on a computer screen. With a glass façade, black walls