Rewiring technology to better serve customers and the business

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

While consumer habits and technologies have changed rapidly, the technology function within organizations has tended to be slower to adapt. That realization—and the desire to create experiences that its customers expect—inspired Verizon Consumer and Business Group (Verizon Consumer Group) to make sweeping changes to its technology organization, from a focus…

Navigating the new geopolitical uncertainty

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

Business leaders today confront a changing world order: intensifying regional conflicts, rising instability, and potential shifts in trade relationships and policy. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, Cindy Levy and Shubham Singhal, global coleaders of McKinsey’s geopolitics work, speak with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about how leaders can orient…

A fitness agenda for government: Cultivating organizational health in the US public sector

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:11 mins read

Government agencies often undertake complex missions that can have a large impact on society. Whether they involve modernizing infrastructure or establishing nationwide health programs, such missions could be described as “big, hairy, audacious goals”—the term coined by management experts Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last.…

Indian farmers’ optimism is driving interest in new products

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:3 mins read

Indian farmers expect better near-term prospects following a year of steady output and multiple years of market and weather-related disruptions. About three-quarters of farmers (76 percent) say they anticipate higher profits over the next two years, with more than 65 percent citing improved yields and higher crop prices as catalysts.…

Poised for take-off: Hyperscaling the United Kingdom’s climate tech

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:17 mins read

By the numbers, the United Kingdom’s start-up technology ecosystem has a lot to be proud of. By value, it is the largest in Europe, employing over three million people and surpassing $1 trillion in valuation in 2024. Much of start-up technology investment in the United Kingdom goes to climate technology…

The State of Luxury: How to navigate a slowdown

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:7 mins read

Over the past five years, the luxury industry experienced a period of exceptional value creation. Between 2019 and 2023, unprecedented demand for personal luxury goods—fashion, leather goods, watches, and jewelry among them—combined with a deep well of supply allowed the sector to achieve a 5 percent compound annual growth rate.…

The ‘value now’ consumer: Making sense of US consumer sentiment and spending

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

In McKinsey’s latest ConsumerWise research, consumers report feeling more optimistic about the US economy than they have all year. Even so, US consumer optimism overall is still lower than prepandemic levels, and more than half of consumers (53 percent) report mixed feelings or being pessimistic about the state of the economy.For…

Charting the path to patients

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:16 mins read

Life sciences is on the cusp of a new era of innovation. The convergence of breakthrough technologies, widespread access to data, and deeper insights into complex biological systems is revolutionizing how the industry approaches R&D. For instance, venture capital funding for machine-learning-enabled drug discovery surged more than sevenfold from 2019…

External innovation: Biopharma dealmaking to boost R&D productivity

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

The competition among biopharmaceutical companies for externally sourced assets is heating up. Despite recent successes delivering innovative therapies at a faster pace and achieving solid returns for shareholders, demand persists across a range of unmet needs. And yet, companies are increasingly pursuing the same disease areas and targets. This “herding”…

Building a shared vision for pharma R&D–supplier partnerships

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:9 mins read

Innovation is flourishing in the biopharmaceutical industry. Over the past decade, the volume of Phase I candidates in the drug development pipeline has grown by 60 percent, promising potential breakthroughs in treating a wide range of diseases. At the same time, there has been a noticeable shift across the industry…

Yuhki Yamashita on ‘user love’ as the fuel for product-led growth

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:16 mins read

In this episode of McKinsey on Building Products, McKinsey partner Rikki Singh sits down with Yuhki Yamashita, chief product officer at Figma, a company that provides collaborative online design tools. With a career in product and design at companies of all sizes, Yamashita has an approach to product development that…

Michael Froman on the business implications of geopolitics

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:11 mins read

Power politics. Wars. Trade battles. Climate change. Pandemics. Geopolitics is increasingly influencing how businesses operate, pushing senior leaders to look well beyond the walls of the corner office. Council on Foreign Relations president Michael Froman has spent his career bridging these worlds, from senior positions in the administrations of Presidents…

What to expect in US healthcare in 2025 and beyond

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:20 mins read

Since 2019, the United States healthcare industry has experienced substantial financial pressure, with industry EBITDA as a proportion of the National Health Expenditure declining by an estimated 150 basis points (Exhibit 1). The decline has hit payers and providers particularly hard—payers’ estimated margins in 2024 could be at their lowest…

Bringing digital to B2B payments

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:17 mins read

Digital payments in the B2B arena have lagged far behind consumer e-commerce, even with the big shift to digital brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The vast majority of B2B payments occur between small and midsize businesses (SMBs), which are the target market for the B2B financial operations platform BILL.…

Scaling gen AI in the life sciences industry

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:15 mins read

Back in July 2023, researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that gen AI could unlock between $60 billion and $110 billion a year in economic value for the pharmaceutical and medical products industries, boosting productivity and innovation in domains across the industry’s value chain—from the way new treatments are…

The hidden traps of business building: A guide for life science CEOs

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:11 mins read

Life science companies have traditionally kept patients and consumers at arm’s length. Pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech companies have viewed providers and payers, not patients, as their key customers and have rarely interacted with them as end customers. This approach has had to evolve in recent years. Consumers are now accustomed…

Unlocking peak operational performance in clinical development with artificial intelligence

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:10 mins read

Despite dedicated efforts across the biopharmaceutical industry to streamline clinical development, clinical trials remain complex, costly, and time-consuming. These challenges are compounded by an increasingly competitive and crowded trial landscape. Yet accelerating clinical development remains crucial—not just for patients but for the enterprise. A 12-month reduction in the clinical development…

Putting people at the center of the R&D talent model in life sciences

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:6 mins read

We are in a moment of vast potential in life sciences—of diversified investments, breakthrough discoveries, and rapid expansion of therapeutics into new modalities and platforms. And AI is increasingly enabling data-driven decision-making across the product life cycle, from AI-supported drug candidate selection to real-time clinical trial site monitoring. However, overall…

Boosting biopharma R&D performance with a next-generation technology stack

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:15 mins read

Amid growing complexities, escalating costs, and a heightened demand for innovative therapies, biopharmaceutical R&D organizations are under pressure to find ways to boost their productivity. Preclinical studies are increasingly using diverse assays, complex “omics” data, and humanized models to evaluate drug candidates. Clinical trials are adopting new trial designs and…

Operational excellence in biopharma research and early development

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

The journey to bring new medicines to market remains long and costly, despite recent technological and process improvements in biopharma R&D. It takes about a decade, on average, from candidate nomination to launch, and study and application costs for investigational new drugs (INDs) have soared in recent years by 20–30…

Why Brazilian farmers are doubling down on productivity

Brazilian farmers have endured multiple challenges since 2023, including crop failures, commodity price declines, and intensified droughts, rain, and wildfires. The result is greater caution, with two-thirds of producers expecting profits to remain stable or decrease in 2024, according to a McKinsey survey. Rising input costs were Brazilian farmers’ main…

How healthcare entities can use M&A to build and scale new businesses

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:18 mins read

During the past five years, healthcare stakeholders’ expectations of sources of industry growth and profits have shifted toward alternative subsegments. For example, healthcare services and technology (HST) subsegments, which represented about $65 billion in earnings in 2023, will experience an estimated 9 percent CAGR during the next five years. By…

Economic empowerment made-to-measure: How companies can benefit more people

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:36 mins read

At a glance The ‘empowerment line’ measures progress toward a world where everyone’s essential needs are met. About 40 percent of the global population lives above the empowerment line—they can afford a standard basket of essential goods and services and begin to save. The rest live below the line, mostly…

How beauty players can scale gen AI in 2025

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:18 mins read

Beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder; it’s at the fingertips of the generative AI (gen AI) prompter. Gen AI could add $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone, and early movers have already begun testing…

Beyond normal: A year in review from McKinsey Talks Operations

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:24 mins read

At the end of 2023, the final McKinsey Talks Operations podcast of the year concluded that there was no such thing as normal for operations leaders. Looking back on the 12 months since then, it seems the sentiment holds true—both everything and nothing has changed. In this episode, hosts Christian…

From engines to algorithms: Gen AI in automotive software development

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:19 mins read

Companies in the automotive and industrial sectors are rewiring to become software-enabled enterprises. As in-vehicle software emerges as a critical differentiator, companies have started to reevaluate the role of software and overhaul their development approaches. Today, software serves as the backbone for advanced features and safety-critical functions while enhancing operational…

Remote-driving services: The next disruption in mobility innovation?

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

Self-driving cars once seemed beyond the realm of possibility, but they are now being piloted on city streets. Now another mobility innovation has emerged that could accelerate and complement autonomy: remote driving.By combining sophisticated communication systems with real-time video feeds, remote-driving systems can instantly convey information about road conditions, traffic,…

Software-defined hardware in the age of AI

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

Over the past two decades, the shift from fixed-function hardware to software-defined hardware has revolutionized industries ranging from networking to mobile communications. With software-defined hardware, developers can improve products and services by continually updating software rather than undertaking more costly and time-consuming hardware upgrades. Devices that were once rigid and…

Getting on board with shared autonomous mobility

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:10 mins read

Shared autonomous vehicles (AVs) now operate in more than ten cities worldwide, including Beijing, Oslo, Phoenix, and San Francisco. More deployments are planned in other regions as AVs with level four capabilities—those that can handle most functions without human intervention—become increasingly sophisticated. While engineers have overcome many technological hurdles for…

Global Economics Intelligence executive summary, November 2024

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:11 mins read

Economies continue to face a range of geopolitical, climatic, and inflation-led challenges, with some also feeling the effects of structural issues. Against this backdrop, China, India, and the US are outperforming other surveyed economies. Among developed economies, US GDP continues to eclipse European output. Real GDP in the US increased…

The case for human-centered AI

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:19 mins read

Over the past two years, generative AI (gen AI) has been a rapidly evolving trend that has touched the lives of many around the globe. Which is why the design of these formidable systems must include experts from diverse backgrounds, says James Landay, a professor of computer science at Stanford…

Scaling a niche start-up into a necessary one: Insights from Arbol

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

Climate change is challenging the limits of traditional insurance by creating new risks and exacerbating old ones at an unprecedented scale. As weather events increase in frequency and severity, many businesses find themselves underinsured or unable to secure coverage. Arbol addresses these growing protection gaps with parametric insurance, which quickly…

Time to think big to close America’s small business productivity gap

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:5 mins read

Sector Variations in Small Business ProductivityAmerica's small businesses vary widely in productivity across different sectors. While U.S. MSMEs are on par with those in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and Italy in many areas, they lag significantly in mining, transportation and storage, and administrative services. The productivity ratio of MSMEs…

Green-steel hubs: A pathway to decarbonize the steel industry

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:4 mins read

Green-steel manufacturing is crucial for the steel industry and the planet, but decarbonizing the global steel production chain is a massive undertaking. Today, the global steel industry is responsible for 7 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Europe is likely to be the first region to decarbonize, with CO2…

What it takes to make separations a competitive difference-maker

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

Every business has a best owner, which may—or may not—be your company. But recognizing that it’s time for a separation (which we define as spin-offs, split-offs, carve-outs, and other sales of businesses in a company’s portfolio) and actually executing separations effectively are very different propositions. Successful companies not only understand…

How hyperscalers are fueling the race for 24/7 clean power

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:10 mins read

As companies across the globe pursue decarbonization targets and the need for green power generation grows, 24/7 clean power purchase agreements (PPAs) are playing an increasingly important role. With their unique ability to provide constant green power, time-matched to demand, these next-level PPAs are helping to unlock investment in nascent…

Procurement’s sustainable (r)evolution

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:21 mins read

New opportunities are coming for organizations to use procurement to gain a competitive edge and drive sustainability impact through innovation and strategic partnerships. However, the complexities of global supply chains and rapidly changing market conditions can make it hard to capture the available value. In this episode of McKinsey Talks…

The battery chemistries powering the future of electric vehicles

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

Battery technology has evolved significantly in recent years. Thirty years ago, when the first lithium ion (Li-ion) cells were commercialized, they mainly included lithium cobalt oxide as cathode material. Numerous other options have emerged since that time. Today’s batteries, including those used in electric vehicles (EVs), generally rely on one…

Blackstone’s Gilles Dellaert on private credit and insurance

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:18 mins read

Gilles Dellaert is the global head of Blackstone Credit and Insurance (BXCI), which was created to bring together Blackstone’s corporate credit, asset-based finance, and insurance groups. BXCI now manages more than $350 billion in assets, accounting for the bulk of Blackstone’s total credit assets and a substantial part of the…