This week, how to simplify your complex organization with a model we call “the helix.” Plus, the coolest trends in mobility and reading picks from Rik Kirkland, McKinsey’s partner for global publishing, who notes that even if economists aren’t always great predictors, they do shed light on the messy world we occupy. |
|
|
It’s a classic corporate drama: a CEO overseeing a company-wide reorganization is trying to allocate resources across groups and just ends up moving people and money into slightly revamped silos. Cut to rising tensions between central functions—such as finance, HR, and IT—and the group’s decentralized businesses. The finale: an org chart, made up of a blurry web of boxes and solid- and dotted-line reporting relationships, floats across the screen. |
As our business environment has become more complex and interconnected, we seem to be replicating that intricacy in our organizations by creating multifaceted matrix structures that simply don’t work anymore. Enter a simple, exciting, and effective model: the helix, as we’ve dubbed it. |
Although the concepts behind the helix aren’t new, their combined power to unlock bottlenecks and strike a balance between centralization and decentralization has never been properly articulated. In a nutshell, the secret lies in separating the traditional management hierarchy into two discrete, parallel lines of accountability—roughly equal in power and authority but fundamentally different. |
One helps develop people and capabilities, sets standards for how work is done, and drives functional excellence; the other focuses those people and capabilities on the priorities for the business, creates value, and helps deliver a full and satisfying customer experience. Essentially, the helix model separates the people tasks from day-to-day business tasks. |
It also frees leaders to develop talent, make resource planning transparent, clarify accountability, and balance performance management. These aren’t small steps, but the payoff—a flexible organization to match the pace of external change and innovation—is big. |
|
|
|
OFF THE CHARTS |
Front-runners in the mobility race |
2019 was a pivotal year for mobility, with electric-vehicle sales setting another record globally. Here’s a look at continuing investments in relevant mobility technologies, with e-hailing and semiconductors leading the pack. |
|
|
|
|
|
SPOTLIGHT ON |
Tech, please |
This year’s CES offered plenty to think about when it comes to next-generation innovation. 5G and virtual reality were big. But amid all the cool gadgets and gizmos that connect everyone to everything, some anxiety poked through when it came to privacy, given all the smart home-protection devices on offer. Environmental worries were also reflected, with do-it-yourself greenhouses and air-filtration systems. But for those who just wanted to see the latest tech for their cars and phones, there was plenty of that as well. |
|
|
|
|
WHAT WE’RE READING
|
Rik Kirkland |
Rik Kirkland, partner for McKinsey’s global publishing group, is based in London. He oversees the creation of articles and other content generated by our consultants and experts (and also plays occasional guitar in a band of McKinsey partners). Before joining the firm in 2008, he ran Fortune magazine.
|
|
|
|
|
Want to know what 2020 holds for the global economy? Don’t ask economists; they’re lousy forecasters. (A gnarly recent research paper by the International Monetary Fund reveals just how consistently private forecasts—and its own—miss calling recessions one year in advance.) |
Instead, what great economists do best, as Robert L. Heilbroner reminds us in The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (first published in 1953), is deliver “an explanation system” that sheds light on the problems and prospects of the messy world we occupy. Inspired by Heilbroner’s classic miniportraits of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and the like, I plunged over the holidays into four contemporary explainers, all worth your consideration. |
Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo briskly tours the latest research on everything from immigration and trade to growth theory. This intellectual power couple, who shared the latest Nobel Prize for economics, honor complexity but also take on beliefs unencumbered by facts. “The real migration crisis,” they declare, isn’t too much international migration but too little movement within countries. Tax cuts for the wealthy? The evidence is clear: they “do not produce economic growth.” |
In Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events, another Nobelist, Robert J. Shiller, argues that, just as actual viruses fuel epidemics, “thought viruses are responsible for many of the changes we observe in economic activities.” Using Google Ngram for books and a ProQuest newspaper search, Shiller tracks the real-world impact of various outbreaks of intellectual “contagion,” from Bitcoin to Arthur Laffer’s supply-side napkin sketches. As a story, it’s hard to dismiss. And the data are impressive too. |
Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—and All of Us by Rana Foroohar, the Financial Times global business columnist, makes a case that Big Tech has gone astray, covering in a more approachable way some of the core insights in Shoshana Zuboff’s award-wining tome from last winter, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. |
Finally, in Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World, economist Branko Milanovic explains why the current buzz about the revival of socialism is wrongheaded. The coming decades will be defined, he argues, by the struggle between the West’s “liberal meritocratic capitalism” and China’s “political capitalism.” (Time hack: you can get the gist of his argument in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.) |
Whatever surprises tomorrow’s headlines bring, these books will at least leave you with a keener sense of where the world is heading. |
|
|
BACKTALK |
Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2020 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007
|
|
|
|