Business, Management, Marketing, Money, Tax, Law, People

A global system of full economic integration—the aspiration of decades of negotiations and the worldwide underpinning of corporate strategy—has never been fully realized. The latest round of global trade talks sputtered to an inconclusive end in the early 2010s. But even as views on the benefits and fairness of the system diverged among countries, there was no overt challenge to the framework of global trade. That changed on April 2,…

In today’s business landscape, more and more companies are focused on reducing both carbon emissions and costs simultaneously. This dual mission is not just a strategic choice but a necessity driven by rising costs and increasing regulatory pressure, such as from Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and European Trading Scheme (ETS, now extended under ETS2), and new disclosure standards taking effect in Australia and Japan. Yet to date, only…

In a world shaped by accelerating change, resilience is essential for both survival and success. Today’s leaders are increasingly seeing that resilience is about not only enduring crises but also thriving in the face of them. Strikingly, research from the World Economic Forum (WEF) and McKinsey suggests that 84 percent of companies report being underprepared for current trends and uncertainties. To understand the role resilience plays in large, global organizations, McKinsey…

Profitability and growth dynamics in the semiconductor industry have shifted dramatically in recent years. The industry as a whole has experienced impressive economic profit growth, rising from $38 billion in the 2000–09 period to $450 billion in 2010–19, according to McKinsey analysis. In October 2024, the McKinsey Global Institute noted semiconductors as one of 18 industries poised to transform the future business landscape, with anticipated value of between $1.7 trillion and…

As our America at 250 series highlights, today’s public sector leaders must navigate choppy seas—and the winds of change may only intensify. For both new and established government leaders, reality may look quite different from the bridge of their ship than from how they imagined it would be based on previous experiences. They must be prepared to learn and adapt. As retired US Navy Admiral Eric Olson notes in McKinsey’s new…

When is a medical-device manufacturer not just a medical-device manufacturer? When it’s also an online marketplace for consumers to buy wellness products and get advice from healthcare providers. Amid unrelenting pressure from digital-first competitors, McKinsey analysis finds that established companies across sectors are increasingly building new business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses to capture their share of the $25 trillion B2C market. B2C business building is gaining traction because the traditional corporate strategy…

Individual and collective health are paramount to productivity, happiness, and overall societal progress in America. Truly enhancing well-being requires adopting an approach to health that adds not only years to life but also life to years. Health is “not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” according to WHO. Good workplace health involves holistic health, which is an integrated view of an individual’s mental, physical, spiritual, and social functioning. To…

Cutting through all the noise about AI, Vijay Guntur, chief technology officer and head of ecosystems at global IT consulting company HCLTech, talks about the inevitable pursuit of ROI and how he sees it not just in financial terms. In a conversation with Abhay Mital, a partner with McKinsey’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice in India, Vijay opens up about deriving value from AI, the challenges of change management, going…

At a glance Achieving high-income status by 2045 would require Indonesia to increase productivity growth by 1.6 times. GDP would need to grow at 5.4 percent a year, and productivity would need to play a bigger part—accelerating its growth rate from 3.1 percent a year since 2000 to 4.9 percent because of changing demographics. Other countries that started with comparable per capita GDP achieved high-income status within 15 to 30…

There has been meaningful momentum toward the energy transition, but a number of forces are creating uncertainty. They include shifting geopolitics, policy uncertainty in many countries, the macroeconomic environment, and rising energy demand from the adoption of artificial intelligence tools, to name a few.But even in the face of these near-term uncertainties, it is important not to lose sight of the core—long-term—challenge at the heart of the transition. The energy…