Complementing “The future of technology,” the first issue in our yearlong celebration of McKinsey Quarterly’s 60th birthday, this 250-page bonus issue mines six decades of Quarterly archives to chronicle how discussions about technology in business have evolved—and how much they’ve stayed the same. We hope you delight in the timeless insights found in these 18 hand-selected classic Quarterly articles—previously available only in archival print issues—and appreciate them for the artifacts of business history that they are. A few highlights:
- “The Successful Innovators” (1965) calls for active participation by top management in setting the R&D agenda, breaking down silos, and facilitating commercialization—advice that’s just as sound today.
- “Managing technological change” (1976) features a fictional CEO who is challenged by a young upstart to reexamine how innovation happens in his company. It’s an innovative bit of storytelling cowritten by Fred Gluck, who would go on to be what we now call our global managing partner and to help institutionalize knowledge development within McKinsey culture.
- “The hidden messages in computer networks” (1987) discusses the long-term social effects of technologies that put people in more frequent communication but also make them feel more emotionally distant. (Sound familiar?)
- “Being intelligent about ‘intelligent’ technology” (1994), one of several articles from the 90s focusing on how computer and internet technologies came to dominate our lives, explores the idea of rebalancing human and machine skills to promote efficiencies and innovation.