McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty

A quick briefing in five—or a fifty-minute deeper dive. Register now for your weekly dose of smart, delivered to your phone.

Sign Up

Genius after the fact

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

Creating creatives

Creativity drives business innovation and growth. But is it reserved for the lucky few?
VIEW EDITION

The talented company

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

Use the force

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

Unprotected

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

The data disconnect

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

Funding follies

You’ve got yourself a high-performing business. So why is it starving for resources?
VIEW EDITION

The coming boom

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

Lights out

Are your factories and warehouses operating in the dark? They might be soon.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

Insecurity

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

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.
VIEW EDITION

Digital lipstick

As digital technology erodes profit and revenue growth, why aren’t companies responding with bold strategies?
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

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?
VIEW EDITION

The 20,000-person start-up

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

Confronting uncertainty

Good strategists manage uncertainty by playing the probabilities. But most of us use wishful thinking instead.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

Success with a capital Zzzz

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

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.
VIEW EDITION

Midlife of design

Design thinking is nearing its 50th birthday, but most companies have yet to realize its business value.
VIEW EDITION

The T-word

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

Decoding leadership

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

Synthetic biology

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

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?
VIEW EDITION

The recipe for success

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

Activists at the gate

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

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.
View Edition

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.
VIEW EDITION

This year’s model

Established business models are under attack. How can companies innovate new ones?
VIEW EDITION

You better shop around

Used to be loyalty was everything. Now consumers would rather shop than stay faithful.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

Better decisions

The path to better decision making means untangling the crossed web of accountability—one decision at a time.
VIEW EDITION

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?
VIEW EDITION

Becoming CEO

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

VIEW EDITION

Going long

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

VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

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.
VIEW EDITION

Back to top

Connect with McKinsey Quarterly

Contact us to provide feedback or submit content proposals.
Contact