McKinsey Quarterly is the business journal of McKinsey & Company.
November 2011
When implementing an organization-wide transformation, focus your efforts on the most connected employees to help generate momentum and accelerate impact.
June 2011
To sustain high performance, organizations must build the capacity to learn and keep changing over time.
April 2011
How PT rose from the ashes of a hostile-takeover bid and then the loss of its all-important subsidiary in Brazil.
March 2011
Pierre Beaudoin explains how a company driven by engineering goals learned to focus on customer expectations, teamwork, and continuous improvement.
They can be a powerful business tool—but only if you get the design right.
A. M. Naik describes how he established a culture of value creation at one of India’s leading companies.
A member of the executive board describes how the Dutch insurance group first transformed its health division and then started to roll out the changes across the entire company.
January 2011
Ten timeless tests can help you kick the tires on your strategy, and kick up the level of strategic dialogue throughout your company.
Former Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin and three other leaders share their approaches to testing strategy.
December 2010
When companies reorganize, few get all the benefits they want in the planned time. Executives at organizations that succeeded point to some key tactics for implementation.
October 2010
Executives can thrive at work and in life by adopting a leadership model that revolves around finding their strengths and connecting with others.
August 2010
Many companies throw financial incentives at senior executives and star performers during times of change. There is a better and less costly solution.
March 2010
In conversation and in excerpts from his recent book, a leading expert on organizational behavior explains why change often stalls and how top executives can use psychology to keep it going.
When organizational transformations succeed, managers typically pay attention to “people issues,” especially fostering collaboration among leaders and employees and building capabilities.
November 2009
The economic slump offers business leaders a chance to more effectively reward talented employees by emphasizing nonfinancial motivators rather than bonuses.
June 2009
Göran Persson has lived a story that should encourage leaders around the world: how to stay in power while pursuing a harsh crisis program that requires sacrifices throughout society.
April 2009
Most companies find it hard to transform themselves in difficult circumstances. Those that use proven tactics markedly improve their chances of success.
Om Prakash Bhatt discusses the transformation of one of India’s oldest banks and reveals how he managed to bring the company’s 200,000 employees on board.
Most change programs fail, but the odds of success can be greatly improved by taking into account these counterintuitive insights about how employees interpret their environment and choose to act.
The CEO of the former Banco Itaú—and now of Itaú Unibanco—describes the problems of changing a company that is set in its successful habits.
March 2009
Courageous companies can use the downturn to make their sales operations not only less expensive but also more effective.
In past downturns, high-tech companies that made these five kinds of moves emerged as leaders of the pack when the economy improved.
February 2009
Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them.
January 2009
In this adaptation from Hayagreeva Rao’s book, he explains the role of activists in making or breaking new markets, products, and services.
November 2008
By focusing on the “soft” side of lean and Six Sigma initiatives, leading global companies gain substantial, scalable, and sustainable advantages.
September 2008
A successful campaign to save 100,000 lives shows that efforts to make it easier for organizations to innovate can yield remarkable results.
August 2008
If organizational transformations are to succeed, change can’t be thought of as a single, standardized process.
Taking a phased “university approach” to change helped one company transform its sales force—successfully—in 6 months rather than the usual 12 to 24.
March 2008
There are a few critical tasks that all finance chiefs must tackle in their first hundred days.
December 2007
Many salespeople resist cross-selling, so management must address their misgivings head on and convince them of its benefits.
Chief financial officers around the world describe their first hundred days on the job as a time when most received guidance, but many had difficulty devoting enough time to their top priorities.
November 2007
A carefully constructed change agent program is essential to any successful operational transformation.
Transforming an organization requires clearly articulated aspirations, as well as the ability to generate energy and new ideas.
April 2007
Companies shouldn’t focus so much on formal structures that they ignore the informal ones.
February 2007
C. John Wilder describes how economic thinking helped him lead TXU out of a regulated mind-set and toward competitive success.
The CEO helps a transformation succeed by communicating its significance, modeling the desired changes, building a strong top team, and getting personally involved.
January 2007
The head of Sandvik Materials Technology describes the challenges of getting more than 8,000 employees on board for a full transformation.
Cost cutting was only the first step in transforming Tata Motors from a cyclical manufacturing company into a diversified powerhouse.
December 2006
Bob Lane details the steps his company took to engage the whole organization in an operational and cultural transformation.
November 2006
CFOs can bring much-needed skills to the CEO role, but the career path isn’t always a direct one.
September 2006
When the Atlantic Philanthropies decided to spend its entire endowment by 2020, it faced huge challenges—which it has so far managed successfully, providing an example for institutions contemplating transformative change.
August 2006
To understand how companies change, over the past year The McKinsey Quarterly talked with a number of successful executives about their experiences and insights.
As they go global, their hardest challenge is to integrate the management of their domestic and foreign businesses.
Paolo Scaroni explains how he helped rescue two troubled businesses and now confronts what is in some respects a more challenging task: leading a highly successful one.
July 2006
Executives say energy and communication are essential for a successful business transformation.
May 2006
John Hammergren discusses his strategy to revive a wounded company.
September 2005
John S. Varley speaks to why high performance doesn't necessarily mean a healthy company. Last in a series of interviews with leading executives on change management.
August 2005
Corrado Passera explains his role in two successful corporate transformations. First in a series of interviews with leading executives on change management.
Joseph M. Tucci describes how to make change stick. Fourth in a series of interviews with leading executives on change management.
Julio Linares explains the design of the company's big turnaround program. Third in a series of interviews with leading executives on change management.
July 2005
Alan G. Lafley discusses how to stretch a company's aspirations without overpromising. Second in a series of interviews with leading executives on change management.
May 2005
Allan Loren explains how he delivered double-digit earnings growth during each of the past four years and raised the company's value by more than 300 percent.
To sustain improvements, companies must have an integrated perspective.
June 2003
An integration manager can help make a merger more successful, but only if the top team knows how to choose and install one.
Two senior executives of Europe’s largest fuel marketer explain how it experienced a huge reorganization.
Companies can transform the attitudes and behavior of their employees by applying psychological breakthroughs that explain why people think and act as they do.
Don’t try to fix problems before you understand the complex relationships among them—and their causes.
February 2003
The CEO of South Korea’s largest bank discusses his plans to turn it into a world-class financial institution.
November 2002
Managing change is the responsibility of everyone in the corporation—from senior managers on down.
In an industry in which many mergers have failed to create value, Fred Hassan has used them to take Pharmacia into the pharmaceutical big leagues. Here he explains how.
February 2001
Just a year after its biggest loss ever, Nissan Motors reported the largest net profit in its history. Read our interview with the man who led Nissan’s spectacular 19-month turnaround, Carlos Ghosn.
November 2000
The art of leading deep corporate change can be learned. The trick is to help each member of the company discover a new reality.
May 1998
Must all companies eventually vanish? Ideas borrowed from evolutionary theory can help companies survive and thrive.
February 1998
Because you are trying to balance customer satisfaction, employee morale, and shareholder returns. It’s very easy to start a vicious cycle of deteriorating performance. Taking out the right costs.
May 1997
You don't just "build" the organization, you make it "go round and round." "Give me a lever," he said, "and I will move the world." Is your change exothermic or endothermic?
February 1996
The school of "hard knocks" doesn’t teach much if cause and effect are blurred. Collapsing time and space may be the best way to change people’s understanding and behavior. New software makes it easier to design games.
Change leaders might not be who you think they are. While most good managers try to keep things under control, real change leaders are determined to shake things up.
November 1995
To transform performance, first know yourself. Most leaders of change are imperfect and far from objective. There are three kinds of levers you can pull. Setting up chain reactions that release rather than use energy.
May 1995
Creating a strategy for change before selecting individual change initiatives raises the odds of success in corporate transformations.
May 1994
Companies often squander their energies on attractive-looking projects that fail to produce bottom-line results.
February 1993
Effective redesign programs balance tightness of focus with lofty ambitions for performance improvement.
Getting the full value from core process redesign means being able to tell—early—when efforts wander off course.
The leader's role is to turn separate initiatives into a balanced, integrated program of change.
A report from the new front lines in the battle to improve organizational performance.
February 1992
An interview with Peter M. Senge author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization.
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