About Suzanne
Suzanne Heywood is a director in McKinsey’s London office and leads our work on organisation design in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
She helps major companies design their organisations to deliver their strategies and put in place efficient structures that are as easy as possible to work within. This can include helping allocate accountabilities within a structure, improving reporting lines, and simplifying major processes. Depending on the company, Suzanne’s work might focus on a single function, the corporate centre or an entire global organisation.
Suzanne has worked with companies in many different industries, including oil and gas, mining, retail, and consumer goods. Whatever the setting, she collaborates closely with the organisation’s leaders, often in workshops, to enable them to co-create and own the new design. Suzanne also focuses on engaging employees in the design process to ensure that the new structure reflects their needs.
Suzanne’s client work is underpinned by her research on a range of organisational design issues, including reducing complexity, reducing costs without damaging effectiveness, preparing an organisation for growth and capturing the benefits and minimising the challenges of being a global organisation.
After a childhood spent sailing around the world on a boat recreating the third voyage of Captain Cook, Suzanne was educated at Oxford and Cambridge.
Published work
“Understanding your globalization penalty,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2011
“Preparing your organization for growth,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2011
“Putting organizational complexity in its place,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2010
“A better way to cut costs,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2009
“Too big to manage?” Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2009
“Cracking the complexity code,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2007
Past experience
Education
| King's College |
PhD in psychology/zoology |
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| Somerville College, Oxford |
MA in zoology |
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