In this report, McKinsey highlight that to better organise for a post pandemic future, leaders should embrace nine imperatives that collectively explain “who we are” as an organisation, “how we operate,” and “how we grow.”
The prospect of successful vaccines or COVID-19 has given business leaders everywhere hope that the pandemic may be finally nearing a turning point. And not a second too soon: the organisational adrenaline that helped many companies get things done quickly and well during the pandemic’s early days has, in many cases, been replaced by fatigue.
Yet even as leaders take action to re-energise their people and organisations, the most forward looking see a larger opportunity—the chance to build on pandemic-related accomplishments and reexamine (or even re-imagine) the organisation’s identity, how it works, and how it grows.
The pressure to change had been building for years. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, senior executives routinely worried their organisations were too slow, too siloed, too bogged down in complicated matrix structures, too bureaucratic. What many leaders feared, and the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organised for a world that is disappearing—an era of standardisation and predictability that’s being overwritten by four big trends: a combination of heightened connectivity, lower transaction costs, unprecedented automation, and shifting demographics. And if incumbents didn’t see the future in themselves they saw it clearly in the competition: digital upstarts that continue to innovate, and win, in bold new ways.