Pushing toward progress
| | | | | |
Click to get this newsletter once a week |
| |
|
| |
| | Brought to you by Alex Panas, global leader of industries, & Becca Coggins, global leader of functional practices and growth platforms
| | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | In the news. Change management is a core responsibility of business leaders. But as uncertainty and complexity persist, they may meet resistance to continuous waves of transformation within their companies. Forbes notes that to master this level of change, managers and leaders will need to adopt a fast-learner mindset. That means being more agile and at ease with a swiftly evolving marketplace or new and disruptive technologies and applying these principles to their management of employees, who may feel anxious about how much change is happening around them. To respond effectively, leaders should build trust, listen to their teams, and invite them to help implement the change. [Forbes]
On McKinsey.com. Organizations and their leaders need new tools, skills, and methods to navigate multiple transformations at once—to make change a source of energy rather than a cause of burnout. As McKinsey’s Aaron De Smet, Arne Gast, Erik Mandersloot, and Richard Steele note, leaders also need to learn how to manage a fundamentally new, more unsettling form of change: reinvention. Reinvention requires rethinking how organizations create value and who they are at their core, and the authors propose five questions that can guide the reinvention journey: for example, how their companies can learn faster than others.
Reinvent to win | | | | | | | In the news. As more AI agents move from pilot to deployment, The Wall Street Journal reports that early adopters in retail, fashion, engineering, and other industries may be reaping measurable benefits. One US-based retailer uses an agent to develop fashion lines, cutting the time from ideation to go-to-market by up to 18 weeks. These positive results may seem to conflict with early research reporting low adoption and no returns. But those studies were likely snapshots of a specific time, rather than final verdicts on the business potential of agents. [WSJ]
On McKinsey.com. This year, corporate leaders focused on two big forces as they worked to navigate a course to sustainable growth. Agentic AI captured their imaginations as the standout opportunity for enhancing productivity, even as they saw escalating geopolitical instability as the biggest obstacle to growth. Through the voices of our leaders, plus timely data and storytelling, our end-of-year wrap-up explores what changed this year and sets leaders up to keep making smart moves in 2026—and beyond.
Explore our best insights of 2025 | | | | | —Edited by Barbara Tierney, senior editor, New York
| | |
| | | |
|
|
|
Copyright © 2025 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007
|
|
|
|
|
