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

Does this sound familiar? A company spends more than $50 million a year on cloud services with a small FinOps team dedicated to tracking expenses. This team, supported by contract labor, uses various solutions to monitor and control spending and to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. Yet cloud waste persists, from storing unnecessary data to using overly expensive services. Such situations are not unique. We looked at more than…

Asia is entering a new era that could pave the way for a meaningful expansion of its global influence. By 2040, Asia could contribute 42 percent of global GDP, be home to 60 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies, and have 55 percent of the world’s total workforce, our analysis shows. The continent could become the engine of global trade while making strides in domestic investments, R&D, innovation, and AI…

Worldwide, 2024 was a difficult year for the residential solar market. After several years of 30 percent annual growth in installations, 2024 saw a decline: fewer panels were installed in many markets, and companies’ valuations declined. This led to large capital injections, major bankruptcies, and job losses.Although these conditions might appear bleak—a delay on the path to net zero and yet another setback in an industry that has taken decades…

What happens when art meets technology, AI, and data? You get the trailblazing digital artist and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), lecturer Refik Anadol. For this episode of At the Edge, Anadol sat down with McKinsey Senior Partner Lareina Yee at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos. They discussed his multisensory installation about the melting glaciers and the joy that comes from bonding with technology to push…

It’s been a year and a half since McKinsey published “Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate.” The comprehensive report examined the effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on office attendance, occupancy, and demand. It also examined related factors, including residential moves from urban centers to the suburbs (which may mean fewer visits to the office) and online versus in-person shopping (which may affect the vibrancy…

The word ‘boomtown’ was practically invented for the mining industry, which has a history of gold rush euphoria followed by equally intense busts. The pattern has continued through the past decade, with mining companies buffeted by a global pandemic, trade tensions, and geopolitical conflicts (Exhibit 1).Very few of them have been able to capitalize on the peak periods to prepare for downturns. Instead, as we noted in 2022, the mining…

Here’s the challenge facing brands and retailers: Communicate clearly with a vast array of consumers who speak thousands of languages, hail from countless different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds, and make purchasing decisions based on highly personal preferences. It’s no easy feat to reach all of these consumers on a broad scale in an authentic way. For some time now, companies have been trying to address customer needs through personalization, using…

Closing the approximately $700 billion annual nature financing gap is essential to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. Alongside the necessary governmental action, the private sector has a critical role to play in mobilizing the funding needed. To support businesses in these efforts, this road map outlines the steps to develop and implement a nature strategy and a nature finance action plan. While focusing on biodiversity credits, the considerations…

Recent volatility has added new layers of complexity to a topic that already challenges business leaders: prioritizing investments. When executives want to understand the trade-offs between different initiatives, they typically compare the projects’ net present values (NPVs)—the measure of an investment’s worth over its entire lifetime discounted to today. In theory, these analyses should balance near-term and long-term financial viability. In practice, however, that’s increasingly difficult to do because uncertain…