McKinsey & Company

American restaurant executives are bracing for another challenging year. While some supply challenges and immediate inflationary pressures have abated, many leaders anticipate hefty annual increases in labor and input costs over the next five years. Restaurants also continue to endure pressure to meet evolving consumer demands in an increasingly competitive environment. A previous article detailed eight “ingredients” for profitable growth—areas of focus that can help restaurants succeed even during a…

Pervasive societal inequity in the United States is strikingly evident in the start-up world. In 2022, Black and Latino founders received only 1 percent and 1.5 percent respectively of total US venture capital (VC) funding. Women-founded teams received 1.9 percent of VC funds, and only 0.1 percent of VC funds went to Black and Latino women founders. It’s a gap that persists through each stage of growth. Looking at the…

It’s easy to go along to get along: give lots of managers an equal say and allot each division its “fair share” of capital. Usually, however, a laissez-faire approach underserves a corporation’s most promising opportunities for growth. Companies typically provide lump sums to division heads, often in proportion to current revenue; choices about funding get pushed across the organization and down its hierarchies, with the result that historic performance repeats…

If you shopped at a FairPrice supermarket in Singapore in early 2022, there’s a small chance that the person who was working the till was none other than FairPrice’s freshly minted group CEO, Vipul Chawla. “Unless I invest at least 100 hours doing something, I don’t have the license to have a conversation with my team, let alone make decisions,” Chawla says. During his first three months with the company,…

Challenging the perception that insurance is a low-tech industry, AIA Group has updated its offerings and processes to become more accessible to millions of customers in Asia. In this episode of the McKinsey on Insurance podcast, Biswa Misra, the group chief technology officer and life operations officer at AIA, spoke to McKinsey senior partner Anand Swaminathan about how he helped chart a course for change, the importance of strong teams…

Over the past few decades, industrial automation has evolved gradually, with few changes in market structure. But the pace of change is accelerating, thanks to technology disruptions and macro trends such as reshoring, a global skilled labor shortage, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts. Is the day likewise coming when software-defined manufacturing will turn shop floors into “smartphones with robotic arms”? A scenario analysis by McKinsey suggests the answer…

Even under the best of circumstances, leaders of corporate functions face enormous cost constraints. Tougher times only raise the pressure to make functions as efficient and effective as is humanly possible. What makes the job even harder is the widespread belief that efficiency and effectiveness counterbalance each other: focusing on efficiency could damage effectiveness, and vice versa. But what if a more optimistic scenario were possible, where effectiveness and efficiency…

The payments start-up Forage applies disruptive technology to the social sector, bringing digital payments to the distribution of government benefits in the United States. In this episode of Talking Banking Matters, we hear from Forage’s co-founder and CEO, Ofek Lavian, about why he chose to tackle what used to be known as “food stamps” and how he feels Forage can benefit recipients of food aid. The following edited transcript presents highlights…

As CEO of Merck, Ken Frazier gained the respect of his employees, shareholders, and the broader community not only through the company’s performance during his 11-year tenure but his handling of several tests of his leadership. Now Merck’s former executive chairman, he recently shared how his experience growing up during the Civil Rights Movement shaped his career, how he ensured that science stayed at the core of Merck’s mission, and…

Many incumbent organizations across industries and sectors want to become more like tech companies: fast, agile, and dominant. They’re doing so to remain competitive at a time when B2B and B2C customers have high and rapidly changing expectations and digital disruptors are upending the business landscape. The key to making this change lies in adopting a technology operating model based on products and platforms. This model organizes technology around user-facing…

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) supports the growth of US renewables at an unprecedented pace. Solar, storage, and onshore wind capacity could reach more than 1,240 gigawatts (GW) over the next decade, growing 2.7 times faster than projected before the IRA took effect (Exhibit 1). The IRA is expected to stimulate domestic manufacturing of modules, subcomponents, inverters, trackers, and more, which could alleviate material shortages that had…

Latin America was once considered an e-commerce laggard, full of consumers who were reluctant to buy online. No longer. The region now has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce sectors in the world. The start-up Melonn (founded in Colombia in 2020 by six friends) aims to capitalize on Latin America’s booming cadre of small and medium-size B2C e-commerce companies. But one of the challenges Melonn faces is a deficit of trust:…

A energetic and tightly grouped collection of social media reaction icons including hearts, thumbs up, happy and surprised faces along with comment and texting bubbles and hashtags. You probably already know what social media is. Whether you cringe at the memory of your Myspace page from the early 2000s, keep in touch with your aunt on Facebook, or are regularly unsettled by too-relevant ads on Instagram, few of us are…

Once considered toys, shared electric kickscooters (e-kickscooters) have grown up. Expanding in number from virtually nothing in 2017 to a peak of 350 million trips among global leading players in 2022, shared e-kickscooters have caught the attention of regulators worldwide. To better understand how guidance may evolve, we identified and examined the regulatory archetypes of the top 100 cities worldwide. Regulatory review of the top 100 global cities Five years…

Generative AI: It’s powerful. It’s accessible. And it’s poised to change the way we work. On this episode of the McKinsey Talks Talent podcast, talent leaders Bryan Hancock and Bill Schaninger talk with McKinsey Technology Council chair Lareina Yee and global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about the promise and pitfalls of using gen AI in HR—from recruiting to performance management to chatbot-enabled professional growth. An edited version of their discussion…

  The travel app Hopper launched in 2015, with the bulk of its initial revenue coming from airline ticket sales. A few years later, the company ramped up a travel fintech business—selling consumers algorithmically enabled financial products such as price-freezing capabilities and cancellation insurance. It has since expanded those offerings and made them available to other travel companies as a B2B service. “When we started Hopper, we thought it would…

One lesson for software companies has become abundantly clear during the last 18 months: pricing needs to be on the C-suite’s agenda. Before then, the industry had been growing so fast for over a decade that executives and investors tended not to view individual product margins as an overriding concern. Now, however, that has all changed. After years of rapid growth, the industry faces economic uncertainty, increased capital costs as…

A small, picturesque village on the Mediterranean coast isn’t usually what comes to mind when we think of the typical birthplace for a global tech unicorn. But Croatia-based Infobip has grown into a global communications giant reaching more than seven billion mobile devices and “things” in more than 200 countries and generating close to $2 billion in revenue. Amid a generative AI revolution, Infobip is helping companies change how their…

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly chats with McKinsey partners Emily Field and Bryan Hancock, as well as senior partner Bill Schaninger, about their new book, Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work (Harvard Business Review Press, July 18, 2023). The authors discuss the critical impact of middle management in vision creation, coaching, and skill development, and share…

Why drive to your neighboring city or region when you can fly? Over the past 30 years or so, the standard response has been because driving is cheaper, more convenient, and probably faster door to door. That may not be true for much longer, however. Advances in aerospace technology, new attitudes about travel, and a growing ecosystem of established players and startups could drive a resurgence in regional air mobility.…

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many companies have implemented flexible work patterns in pursuit of better employee experience, real estate cost savings, and more sustainable operations. However, a McKinsey survey of real estate and employee experience executives from 50 companies reveals that most firms have only scratched the surface. The survey asked how far along companies are in implementing 12 practices McKinsey has identified as key to developing effective and…

The agriculture industry is under pressure. Dramatic cost increases for inputs and labor are putting farmers’ profitability at risk. Globally, farmers report that prices for inputs such as fertilizer and crop protection chemicals have risen by 80 to 250 percent over the past few years. Climate change is also squeezing profits. A warmer climate is resulting in increased weather variability, more frequent acute weather events, longer droughts, and new invasive…

For the past few years, the middle class in Vietnam has been on the rise, spreading out geographically and growing increasingly diverse. Consumers are growing in number and becoming more demanding and discerning. It is estimated that more than half of the Vietnamese population will enter the global middle class by 2035, creating more disposable income and fueling consumption. Middle-class consumers in Vietnam have generally been optimistic—a sentiment that appears…

US healthcare organizations continue to grapple with the impacts of the nursing shortage—scaling back of health services, increasing staff burnout and mental-health challenges, and rising labor costs. While several health systems have had some success in rebuilding their nursing workforces  in recent months, estimates still suggest a potential shortage of 200,000 to 450,000 nurses in the United States, with acute-care settings likely to be most affected. Identifying opportunities to close…

Semiconductor wafers are the basis of the integrated circuits so crucial to most of today’s technology. The wafers’ packaging—whether metal, plastic, ceramic, or glass—connects them to their environment and protects them from chemical contamination and damage from light, heat, and impacts. Compared with the front-end process of designing and fabricating wafers, the back-end process of packaging has been undervalued for two reasons: First, it’s still possible to package wafers using…

The value of working together is intuitive to most leaders. Capturing the full value of operating as one firm, however, is elusive for most. Those who drive integration and standardization from the top down often stifle business-level innovation, entrepreneurship, and client responsiveness, which can further create talent attraction and retention issues.