FOUR OF OUR BEST NEW IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

This is our last voyage at the helm of the good ship CEO Shortlist. We’re very pleased to turn the newsletter over to two new leaders at McKinsey. Alex Panas is our new global leader of industry sectors. He previously led our Advanced Industries and Private Capital Practices and was a member of our board. Axel Karlsson is the new global leader of functional practices and a senior partner in the Stockholm office. For many years, he led our Technology, Media & Telecommunications and Operations Practices.

In this edition, we’re sharing four of our most popular articles from the past two years. These takes are aging pretty well, we’re pleased to say. For us, they have been the highlights of an amazing journey. We’ve so enjoyed bringing you the best of McKinsey’s ideas and hearing from you about what you liked—and didn’t. We’re really looking forward to seeing where Alex and Axel take us. And we’re confident you’ll continue to enjoy the read.

—Liz and Homayoun

What’s new

What will gen AI be worth to business? It’s the question of the day, or maybe of a generation. The McKinsey Global Institute took a crack at some answers, and readers have responded—this is McKinsey’s most popular report of the past two years.

Find out what gen AI can do for your bottom line in The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, by Michael Chui and coauthors. 

What’s now

Gen AI has crashed the party. That was one of the first findings of the McKinsey Technology Council’s 2023 roundup of trends in tech. The council then estimated the potential for value creation in applied AI, advanced connectivity, green technologies, and many other arenas—and laid out some strategies for how to achieve it. Watch for the 2024 edition of our Technology Trends Outlook, publishing this month.

In the meantime, get a reminder of gen AI’s potential with McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2023, by Michael Chui and coauthors.

What’s next

Can gen AI play a role in building the organization? You better believe it. That’s one of ten seismic shifts we explored in our State of Organizations 2023 report. Companies are already using AI to create sustainable talent pipelines, drastically improve ways of working, and make faster, data-driven structural changes. What’s next?

Get smart about the companies of today and tomorrow with The State of Organizations 2023, by Dana Maor and coauthors.

What’s needed

What matters most? Every year, we talk with hundreds of CEOs about their plans and priorities, successes and struggles. And every year, we collect the wisdom of that illustrious crowd in an article (here are the 2021 and 2022 editions). At the end of 2023, CEOs were thinking about gen AI, superpowers, geopolitics, and more. Halfway through 2024, CEOs tell us these are the topics they’re still thinking about—and acting on.

Reorder your world with “What matters most? Eight CEO priorities for 2024,” by Homayoun Hatami and Liz Hilton Segel.

We hope you find these ideas inspiring and helpful. See you next time with four more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite. 

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