How to See "Structure"
You have probably already learned about the importance of distinguishing among events, patterns, and structure. But still, you may be finding it difficult to apply this distinction. Perhaps when you try to analyze an issue from this perspective, the lines between patterns and structure get blurred or you find structure hard to see. You are not alone many learners encounter these difficulties. There are guidelines, however, that can help you to see structure and seeing structure will provide you with leverage for solving your long-term business challenges.
What Does a Future With No Jobs Look Like? – The Startup
In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, British economist John Maynard Keynes published the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”. Keynes concluded that the Depression was only temporary and predicted that by 2030, people would work no more than 15 hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and culture. Keynes was right about economic growth recovering, but most of us work far more than 15 hours a week.
The change management mind-set: Getting personal
A surefire way to shoot yourself in the foot when you’re leading a large-scale change effort is to ignore what’s on the minds of your employees. In research we conducted for our recently published book, Beyond Performance 2.0 (John Wiley & Sons, July 2019), we found that executives at exactly zero companies that disregarded an analysis of employee mind-sets during a change program rated the transformation as “extremely successful.” Conversely, executives at companies that took the time and trouble to address mind-sets were four times more likely than those that didn’t to rate their change programs as at least “successful.”
The global case for customer experience in government
In the private sector, customer experience has become a core metric of performance—with leaders outperforming laggards in the S&P 500 by more than 200 percent in the past decade. Government leaders around the world are waking up to the implications. On the one hand, there are rising public expectations and pressure to improve. On the other hand, there is an immense opportunity to adopt new approaches and technologies to accelerate the change. Some government agencies have caught the wave—reimagining their services end to end from the standpoint of their customers—and employing next-generation levers from the private sector, such as digitization and design thinking, advanced analytics, and automation, to upend traditional ways of working. However, these examples remain the exception, not the rule.
Company of the Future
Unlocking continuous human learning capabilities. As humans increasingly focus on higher-level thinking, they will need to learn and practice new skills. This shift will not be “one-shot” learning—the required abilities will continue to evolve unpredictably.
The forgotten step in leading large-scale change
In Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-scale Change (John Wiley & Sons, July 2019), McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger draw on their 40-plus years of combined experience, and on the most comprehensive research effort of its kind, to provide a practical and proven how-to guide for executives managing corporate transformations. “A better way to lead large-scale change,” the first article based on the book, provides an overview of the authors’ approach and explains why it works. This second article, based on the book’s fourth chapter, provides an in-depth look into the most often neglected stage of the change process. A future article will discuss how to create the ownership and energy needed for success. When Charles Holliday Jr. became CEO of the chemical giant DuPont, he felt it was time for a revolution. The new CEO had a long-term vision: expanding the company’s focus far beyond its chemical offerings to become a science-based enterprise.
Company of the Future
Unlocking continuous human learning capabilities. As humans increasingly focus on higher-level thinking, they will need to learn and practice new skills. This shift will not be “one-shot” learning—the required abilities will continue to evolve unpredictably. Learning will therefore need to be embedded in the workflow, and responsive to changing needs, rather than being batched at the beginning of careers. Organizations will also need to invest in “learning contracts” with employees, mutually committing to continuously develop new skills for new roles. Leading in ecosystems.
The Self-Tuning Enterprise
Wouldn’t it be nice if an algorithm could tell you when to develop a new business model or whether to enter a new market? We’d be lying if we said that such an algorithm exists. It doesn’t, and we don’t imagine a time in the foreseeable future when algorithms (or other forms of artificial intelligence) will be able to answer such difficult strategic questions.
How smart platforms can crack the complexity challenge in project industries
Modularization excels in high-volume industries such as automotive, but does it offer tangible benefits for companies that tackle just a few, extremely complicated projects each year? The builders of steel plants, chemical plants, paper mills, wind parks, packaging lines, or power plants fall into this category, completing a handful of highly specialized solutions every year that feature very specialized components. New research—laid out in our report Smart platforms: Cracking the complexity challenge of project industries—affirms that, if done right, a modular platform strategy can deliver significant value quickly in these situations to fix the complexity challenge. In industries focused on large projects, companies typically face four key challenges: customization at low prices, delays and cost overruns, long payback times due to low volumes, and flexibility between customers and suppliers.
Transform the whole business, not just parts
That’s the conventional wisdom: improve one part at a time, then move to the next, methodically and consistently. But it’s clear that this traditional view, with stability as the primary value, is increasingly wrong. It misses the intersections between the parts, which are where value tends to be lost. Research by our colleagues (see Kevin Laczkowski, Tao Tan, and Matthias Winter, “The numbers behind successful transformations,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2019) shows that the most successful performance transformation efforts cut across business units and functions, target both the top and bottom lines, and engage a substantial share of the workforce. At best, we find, improving the parts improves only those parts, without necessarily reaching the whole.
