McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty

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When disaster strikes

What to do when the worst happens to your company? Here are the near and far-term moves you’ll need to make.
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Getting your story straight

Emotional stories help innovative ideas attract attention—and get funded. Here are the narratives that help good ideas break through.
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Fear/fear not

The robots are coming for our jobs—that’s the widely held view. But the likely outcome is a bit more nuanced.
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Emerging outperformers

Does the recent turbulence in emerging markets mean global growth will slow? New research suggests otherwise.
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Digital’s hard truths

Want to better understand what digital is doing to your business? Look to the underlying economics. 
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Flooring it

Are you a market leader? It may be time to start doing things faster. 
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The data-talent link

A compelling mash-up of analytics, data, and talent management is showing companies where HR misses the mark.
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Genius after the fact

Did you know it all along? Then you may be a victim of hindsight bias. 
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Creating creatives

Creativity drives business innovation and growth. But is it reserved for the lucky few?
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The talented company

Want to get the most from your talented employees? Start with a more energetic approach to matching people and opportunities.
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Use the force

How does AI work best? As a force multiplier for data analytics.
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Unprotected

Your air conditioning system. Your factory widgets. Even the fish tank thermometer. Every IoT sensor is a potential target for hackers.
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The data disconnect

Companies may have more data than ever, but not everyone is making money with it.
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Funding follies

You’ve got yourself a high-performing business. So why is it starving for resources?
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The coming boom

The global economy could be on the cusp of a productivity boom—and big opportunities for companies.
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Lights out

Are your factories and warehouses operating in the dark? They might be soon.
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Real-world AI

Unsure where or how AI applies to your company? McKinsey Global Institute found over 400 real-life examples where AI can improve longstanding business challenges.
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Insecurity

Trojan-infested botnets. Distributed denials of service. Credential stuffing attacks. How secure is your company in an age of cybercrime?
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Shake it up

Want to avoid the complacency that so often follows success? Take lessons from Pixar’s high-morale collection of subversives and malcontents.
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Digital lipstick

As digital technology erodes profit and revenue growth, why aren’t companies responding with bold strategies?
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Try a little weird

Tony Hsieh, the unconventional CEO of Zappos, is not afraid to create “a little weirdness.” In fact it’s a core value.
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Platform plays

Platforms are the favored operating model of seven of the world’s 12 largest corporations. So why have so few old-line companies followed suit?
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The 20,000-person start-up

How do you get incumbent companies to perform like a start-up? By rethinking organizational culture.
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Confronting uncertainty

Good strategists manage uncertainty by playing the probabilities. But most of us use wishful thinking instead.
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The lifecycle of a CEO

A CEO’s job starts out tough—and then gets tougher. Here’s advice for the early, middle, and late stages of a CEO’s tenure.
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Success with a capital Zzzz

If sleep is essential to effective leadership, why do so many executives fail to sleep enough?
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Jerk factors

Maybe you don’t act like a jerk in the workplace, but you might turn into one when exposed to the following triggers.
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Midlife of design

Design thinking is nearing its 50th birthday, but most companies have yet to realize its business value.
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The T-word

Is your corporate transformation doomed to fail? Here’s advice for beating the long odds of success.
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Decoding leadership

What skills and behaviors make a good leader effective? Here are the traits that matter.
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Synthetic biology

What do you get when you combine genetic engineering with big data analytics? A new technology for disruptive innovation.
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Savoring the surprise

Monetize the data. That’s the mantra for companies looking to grow through data and analytics. But how do you turn insights into action?
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The recipe for success

What combination of management practices leads to the healthiest, highest-performing companies? We found four recipes for success.
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Activists at the gate

How do you know a corporate board is effective? Look to the number of activist investors it attracts.
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Strategy vs execution

What matters more—great strategy or great execution? New research finds that strategy wins, especially disruptive strategies that respond powerfully to digitization.
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Ultralarge

Space stations, airports, power projects, and dams. These ultra-large projects suffer from big overruns in schedule and cost. Here’s how to fix them.
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This year’s model

Established business models are under attack. How can companies innovate new ones?
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You better shop around

Used to be loyalty was everything. Now consumers would rather shop than stay faithful.
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Rudeness on the rise

As more managers and employees behave badly at work, the cost of incivility is steep. To remedy the rudeness, companies should start with the boss.
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Gut instincts

Should corporate executives trust their intuition? Sometimes yes, but other times no, says Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann. Four tests can help you decide.
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The organic path to growth

What’s the best way to grow a company? Many executives gravitate toward mergers and acquisitions. But organic growth, done right, delivers long-term value, too.
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Better decisions

The path to better decision making means untangling the crossed web of accountability—one decision at a time.
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The front lines of gender inequality

More than 75 percent of CEOs have made gender diversity a top priority at their companies. So why do men still get paid more, and promoted more often, than women?
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Becoming CEO

You’ve just become the chief executive officer of a big company. Now what do you do?

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Going long

Are executives too focused on the short term? If so, does it really matter?

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The digital effect

What does the digitization of industries mean for future revenue and profit growth? McKinsey put that question to 2,135 global executives in a survey late last year. The findings are bad news for average companies.
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Evaluate this

Premier edition—Want better performance from your employees? Drop the annual review process and its ill-fitting stack-and-rank ratings approach. You're better off crowdsourcing evaluations as part of a new approach to motivating workers.
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