18 Posts found for Publisher: McKinsey Quarterly

When you ask these questions of first-line employees, you quickly discover that in most companies there’s still a big gap between the rhetoric of innovation and the reality:

• How have you been trained as a business innovator? What investment has the company made in teaching you how to innovate?
• If you have a new idea, how much bureaucracy do you have to go through to get

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Gary Hamel, Joanna Barsh, Lowell Bryan | Subject: Innovation Questions

Ask yourself these nine questions before you lend your company’s voice to an issue. If you answer no to any of them, it’s unwise to proceed.

1. Is the issue central to your business’s values, code of conduct, or other existing public commitments?
2. Is the issue an environmental or social priority, according to a rigorous materiality assessment?
3. Does the issue pertain to commitments you have made to

… [ Read more ]

Author: Alison Taylor | Source: Author Talks: The business of ethics for leaders | Subjects: Communications Questions, Social Responsibility Questions

Direction-setting checklist: Be bold

1. Vision: Do we have a clear and compelling vision that reframes what winning looks like, and is it owned by the whole enterprise?
2. Strategy: Have we created a short list of clearly defined big moves at the enterprise level that will distance us from our competitors?
3. Resource allocation: Are we ‘thinking like an outsider’ to actively reallocate resources (such as dollars, people,

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra | Source: The CEO’s essential checklist: Questions every chief executive should be able to answer | Subject: CEO / Executive Questions

IBM has honed a position since the 1950s when it spoke about and acted on racial justice. The company asks its employees to ask themselves the following five questions.

1. Is the issue directly linked to the business?
2. Does the company have a history of engaging in it?
3. What are the stakeholders saying?
4. What are the competitors doing?
5. Could the company make a meaningful difference by engaging?

At the moment, … [ Read more ]

Author: Lucy Parker | Source: Author Talks: How you can future-proof your business for sustainable, long-term growth | Subject: Social Responsibility Questions

Companies need to determine how functions best fit into their value-creation narrative. Organizations must answer the following questions:

1. What are the key decisions that business-unit leaders need to make, and what do they need to control? For example, if IT business-application development is a core enabler for a business unit’s growth strategy, how much control does its leader need to ensure that projects are

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Aaron De Smet, Caitlin Hewes, Elizabeth Mygatt, Kirk Rieckhoff | Source: Redefining corporate functions to better support strategy and growth | Subject: Management Questions

• Do we shelter toxic leaders?
• Do we have the right people in the right places (especially managers)?
• Is our work environment transactional or relational?
• Are our benefits aligned with employee priorities?
• Employees want career paths and development opportunities. Can we provide it?
• How are we building a sense of community?

Authors: Aaron De Smet, Bill Schaninger, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi | Source: ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours | Subject: Human Resources Questions

Purpose defines our core reason for being and the positive impact we have on the world. It shapes our strategy, inspires our people, engages our customers and community, steers choices at moments of truth, and is fully embedded in our culture. Whether we are reappraising an existing purpose or designing one for the first time, we need to wrestle with challenging questions such as the … [ Read more ]

Authors: Arne Gast, Bill Schaninger, Bruce Simpson, Nina Probst, Pablo Illanes | Source: Purpose: Shifting from Why to How | Subjects: Management Questions, Mission / Vision / Values, Organization Questions

By asking core questions along these dimensions, it is possible to determine the cornerstones of a next-generation operating model.

Processes

• Process design. How should we design functional, cross-sector, and support processes? How can we best integrate innovations? How can we accelerate decisions?
• Performance management. What are our most important KPIs? How do we set and track targets? How do we encourage decision-orientation and collaboration?
• IT systems and technologies.

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Andreas Seyfert, Christoph Kuntze, Tim Lange | Source: Next-generation supply chain—transforming your supply chain operating model for a digital world | Subject: Management Questions

1. Direction. Do leaders communicate a clear and compelling vision of where the organization is headed, how to get there, and what it means for people?
2. Accountability. Do leaders in the organization ensure individuals understand what is expected of them, have sufficient authority and feel accountable for delivering results?
3. Coordination & Control. Do leaders consistently measure and manage business and risk, and act to address problems when

… [ Read more ]

Source: Organizational Health Index | Subject: Organization Questions

To understand where to focus on your sales operations transformation journey, start by asking yourself and your organization a few simple questions:

• How much of your sales resources are in sales-support roles versus front-line sellers and sales managers?
• To what degree is your sales-operations function centralized or dispersed by customer segment, business unit, or region?
• What are the metrics and reports you use for sales-performance management activities?

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Bertil Chappuis, Brian Selby | Source: Looking Beyond Technology to Drive Sales Operations | Subject: Sales Questions

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the following eight essentials constitute just such an operating system. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set … [ Read more ]

Authors: Erik Roth, Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston | Source: The Eight Essentials of Innovation | Subject: Innovation Questions

• Does it violate any strategic laws of gravity?
• Do my numbers match my strategy?
• Will it create value?
• Is it material?
• Is it differentiated?
• Is it just ‘PowerPoint engineering’? (assuming that anything people say they can do, they can do)
• Where are we in our strategic journey?
• Are we properly balancing growth and risk?
• What are the facts?
• Is the problem solvable, and do we care?
• Who can solve that problem?
• Why might we fail?
• How

… [ Read more ]

Authors: David Speiser, Gail Lumsden, Jeffrey Elton, Raymond Gilmartin | Source: How We Do It: Strategic Tests From Four Senior Executives | Subject: Strategy Questions

Top performers understand that while a company can pursue outstanding holistic performance, it still must develop its reinvention muscles to respond effectively in times of uncertainty. The opposite is also true: an organization can push to reinvent itself, but if it doesn’t deliver financial results, the transformation won’t be sustainable.

After committing to a transformation, the executive team should ask questions in ten categories about the … [ Read more ]

Authors: Cesar Okajima, Fábio Stul, José Pimenta da Gama, Sara Pliego | Source: How bold is your business transformation? A new way to measure progress | Subject: Change Management Questions

Capital markets

• What has driven our historic shareholder returns over various time horizons?
• How does our valuation stack up to peers’ today, and why?
• What are the highest-impact levers to change our valuation (growth, margin improvement rates, etcetera)?

Strategy

Are we in the right businesses, geographies, sectors, product lines, and customer segments?

How can we strengthen our competitive advantage in these chosen areas?

What are our highest-potential M&A, partnership, and divestment opportunities?

Commercial

• What

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra | Source: Staying ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance | Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

1. What are the greatest opportunities we haven’t yet capitalized on? 
2. What are the greatest threats that could end this storied franchise if not addressed? 
3. What is the one thing I could do to screw it up?
4. What do you hope will change? 
5. What should not change? 
6. What aren’t people telling me that I need to know? 
7. What am I not hearing that I should be hearing?

Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra | Source: Starting strong: Making your CEO transition a catalyst for renewal | Subjects: Corporate Governance Questions, Leadership Questions

• Can we measure the trade-off between an investment in our culture and an investment in new products or services?
• How should we balance cultural continuity against the need to adopt fresh ideas and practices?
• How can we build a “talent brand” to attract the best people?

Authors: Andrew Doman, Kim Warren, Maurice Glucksman, Nhuoc-Lan Tu | Source: The Talent-Growth Dynamic | Subject: Human Resources Questions

• Can we make a business case for all of our development programs?
• What balance should we attempt to strike between developing our own talent internally and bringing in talent from the outside?
• How does the shape of our promotion pyramid affect our growth prospects?
• Do we have too many people at the top?
• Should we train anyone at all?

Authors: Andrew Doman, Kim Warren, Maurice Glucksman, Nhuoc-Lan Tu | Source: The Talent-Growth Dynamic | Subject: Human Resources Questions

• What effect would losing one high performer have on our share price?
• What if we lost ten?
• How much value do we forgo by hanging on to poor performers?

Authors: Andrew Doman, Kim Warren, Maurice Glucksman, Nhuoc-Lan Tu | Source: The Talent-Growth Dynamic | Subject: Human Resources Questions