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Axel Karlsson

Senior Partner, and Global Leader, Functional Practices and Growth PlatformsStockholm

Leads our functional practices and growth platforms globally. Helps companies improve performance by drawing on his expertise in technology, strategy, and operations.

Axel is McKinsey’s global leader of our functional practices, which includes strategy and corporate finance; growth, marketing and sales; risk and resilience; operations; sustainability; transformation; and people & organizational performance. Axel is also co-chair of the committee that elects McKinsey’s new senior partners. Axel focuses on bringing the best of McKinsey’s expertise, data, and solutions to clients, and shaping our future capabilities to meet our clients’ evolving needs.

Previously, Axel co-led the Global Operations Practice and led the Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice in Asia while he was based in Hong Kong.

Axel advises clients on a broad array of issues related to technology, strategy, and operations, including cost cutting, digital transformations, agile organization, product development, and supply chain.

Examples of his recent client projects include the following:

  • helping a leading telecommunications client dramatically cut costs while moving to an agile organization model
  • advising a telecommunications group on how to set up a digital transformation over the coming five years while simultaneously undergoing rapid cost restructuring
  • assisting a leading telecommunications-network-equipment company develop its corporate strategy and undertake a reorganization
  • supporting the adoption of an agile software-development model for a high-tech company
  • helping a media client reinvent its business model and launch a digital transformation
  • assisting a leading high-tech company leverage its big data assets to create new service lines for its customers
  • improving purchasing and optimizing R&D processes for a global data-storage company—yielding cost reductions averaging 30 percent across several categories

Published work

Navigating the new normal: Operations insights for 2024,” McKinsey & Company, November 2023

How business operations can respond to price increases: A CEO guide,” McKinsey & Company, March 2022

The CEO: Architect of the new operations agenda,” McKinsey & Company, December 2021

Building value-chain resilience with AI,” McKinsey & Company, November 2021

Japan at a crossroads: The 4G to 5G (r)evolution,” McKinsey & Company, January 2018

Digital music’s Asian beat,” McKinsey Quarterly, November 2016

Education

Stockholm School of Economics
MS, accounting and finance