OUR BEST IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

Welcome to the latest edition of The CEO Shortlist, a biweekly newsletter of our best ideas for the C-suite. In this issue, we take up two topics high on the CEO agenda: how to build new businesses that actually scale, and how AI is becoming central to the way companies operate. We appreciate the opportunity to connect and hope you find our perspectives useful and thought provoking. You can reach us at Alex_Panas@McKinsey.com and Becca_Coggins@McKinsey.com. Thank you, as ever.

—Alex and Becca

New-business building never went away. With organic growth harder to come by, roughly 40 percent of CEOs still rank new-business building among their top three priorities. Most of these ventures stall, though—not for lack of ideas but because the parent’s incentives and governance often stymie the speed a young business needs. Our new research finds that when the CEO personally owns the work, setting it as strategy, funding it with patience, and killing weak bets early, new ventures can reach nearly 20 percent of enterprise revenue within five years. 

Technology is the easy part. Executives from Dell, AMD, Mercedes-Benz, and Liquid AI sat down with McKinsey to compare notes on putting AI at the core of how they run. They kept returning to one point: It’s not about the tools; it’s about the people. Dell used AI to raise revenue while lowering costs but credits the gains not to the software but to sustained commitment from leadership and broad adoption across the organization. The practical lessons? Make AI the CEO’s job, train everyone, set guardrails without bureaucracy, and keep iterating long past the first pilot. 

We hope you find these insights helpful. See you in a couple of weeks with more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.

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