|
|
|
|
| THREE QUESTIONS FOR |
| Elizabeth Mygatt |
| Elizabeth Mygatt, an associate partner in McKinsey’s Boston office, advises clients on organizational transformation, with a focus on design, governance, and decision rights.
|
|
|
|
|
| What defines future-ready organizations, and what characteristics do they share? |
| Companies recognize that the pandemic offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change, presenting executives with a unique “unfreezing” opportunity. Yet even as leaders take action to reenergize their people and organizations, the most forward looking see a larger opportunity to build on pandemic-related accomplishments and reexamine the organization’s identity, operating model, and ability to grow. |
| The experimentation underway suggests that future-ready companies share three characteristics: they know what they are and what they stand for, they operate with a fixation on speed and simplicity, and they grow by scaling up their ability to learn, innovate, and partner outside their broader ecosystem. By embracing these fundamentals, companies improve their odds of thriving in the postpandemic world. |
| What concrete steps can future-ready organizations take to break away from the pack? |
| In terms of identity, people want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Companies that focus only on profits will lose ground to organizations that create a strong identity that meets employees’ needs for affiliation and meaning. |
| Future-ready organizations accomplish this in three ways: they clarify their purpose, they know how they create value and allocate resources accordingly, and they create strong and distinct cultures that help attract and retain the people they need. |
| While the COVID-19 crisis has made speed a priority for many organizations, it has also reinforced how difficult speed is to harness. Operating models need to be fast, nimble, and frictionless to create ways of working that foster agility and simplicity. They should enable a network of empowered, dynamic teams to find pockets of value—including at the company’s “edges,” where employees are closest to customers—and build the organizational muscle to make decisions faster than the market. |
| As connectivity and automation increase, and as the expectations of younger generations change, businesses must prepare for nimble and constant adaptation if they hope to grow. The best way to do this is by harnessing a vibrant ecosystem of partners outside the company’s traditional boundaries, building data-rich technology platforms that support growth and innovation, and accelerating learning to fuel the talent engine that businesses will need to succeed. |
| What are the trends we see from leading companies? |
| In our research, we noted that top-performing companies didn’t concentrate their efforts on any single category but instead tended to experiment boldly across all of them, suggesting interdependency across categories. An analysis of 30 leading US companies showed more frequent bold moves around purpose (83 percent made bold moves), ecosystems (83 percent), and data-rich tech platforms (73 percent). In an increasingly winner-takes-all economy, where even above-average performance won’t guarantee returns above the cost of capital, we expect the bar on organizational innovation only to rise. |
|
|
| PARTING THOUGHT |
 |
| — Edited by Barbara Tierney |
|
|
|
|
|
| BACKTALK |
| Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
|
|
|
|
Did you enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to colleagues and friends so they can subscribe too.
Was this issue forwarded to you? Sign up for it and sample our 40+ other free email subscriptions here.
|
|
|
Copyright © 2021 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007
|
|
|
