Aerospace sector

Author’s note: Alistair Hanna, Michael Reopel, and Stuart Flack, all of McKinsey & Company, contributed to this article. The U.S. defense industry is struggling to reorganize itself for growth, if not for survival. The disappearance of the communist threat and the desperate need to revive the U.S. economy have taken the defense industry for a […]

Six ways to get started.

A couple of years ago, I coauthored with Rob Lachenauer an article called “Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Competition.” The piece, along with a subsequent book, was misunderstood by many people. Critics said that hardball meant playing dirty or mean, neither of which is true. What is true is that hardball—let’s face it, […]

Exploring new frontiers in health care.

By now, the monolithic factory was supposed to have given way to the virtual factory: a community linked by an electronic network that would enable numerous...

Corporate America and the U.S. Navy share one big problem: employee retention. Today's knowledge workers hop from start-up to start-up. And 40% of the...

The president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, goes undercover as a...

Sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what's really going on in the marketplace. Marketing people, in turn, believe the...

Despite the enormous time and energy that goes into strategy development, many companies have little to show for their efforts. Indeed, research by the...

Eighteen months into the pandemic, a panel of experts discuss what’s changed, whether the bailouts were misspent, and if business travel is ever coming back.

Twenty-five years ago today, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration made a tragic and very public error in judgment. Despite concerns that cold weather could reduce the effectiveness of the o-ring pressure seals at the joints of the space shuttle’s solid rocket motors, NASA managers approved the launch of the Challenger on January 28, when […]

Surveys indicate that when new rules on expensing stock options take effect, many companies are likely to limit the number of employees who can receive...

We have to admire salespeople's resilience in the face of endless rejection, their certainty that things will work out in the end. At the same time, we're...

Investing significant time and money in a project can made it hard to pull the plug on it. Learn how Boeing tragically fell prey to the "sunk-cost bias"...

Singapore Airlines is widely regarded as an exemplar of excellence in an industry whose service standards are tumbling. What's not so well known is that...

The president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, goes undercover as a...

Successful executives who cut their teeth in stable industries or in developed countries often stumble when they face more volatile markets. They falter,...

The sky is no longer the limit for what the innovative Indian mind can achieve. Or so I thought on April 28, as I witnessed with awe and pride India's...

When Delta emerged from bankruptcy, in 2007, its leaders knew that a full recovery would depend on innovative thinking. They began by instituting an employee...

Procurement has increasingly become central to companies' strategies--and even drives innovation.