Monthly Newsletter
November 2011

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Editors’ choice
How ‘big data’ is transforming business

Right now at your own company, it’s quite possible that sensors in process machinery are collecting operational data, marketers are using location data from smartphones to demystify teenagers’ buying quirks, and data exchanges are creating networks with your supply chain partners. As an explosion of data transforms processes, corporate ecosystems, and approaches to innovation, it’s important to remember that new technologies and tools raise productivity not only because companies adopt them but also, more critically, because they enable new management practices and organizational structures. So in this month’s newsletter, we highlight a package of articles that can help executives navigate the era of big data.

Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’?

Competing through data: Three experts offer their game plans
[with interactive video]

Seizing the potential of ‘big data’

How strategic is our technology agenda?

By Invitation: Three articles by eminent thinkers
Understanding the Second Great Contraction: An interview with Kenneth Rogoff
The economist and coauthor of This Time Is Different explains what history teaches us about the global downturn and why climbing out of it is still full of risks.

Daniel Kahneman: Beware the ‘inside view’
In an excerpt from his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel laureate recalls how an inwardly focused forecasting approach once led him astray, and why an external perspective can help executives do better.

The second economy
W. Brian Arthur shows how digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible, thereby engendering the most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Also be sure to read some of our readers’ comments on this article, as well as the author’s responses.

This month’s highlights
FOOD & AGRICULTURE
Fishing for sustainability
Fisheries create work for 180 million people and $500 billion a year in economic activity. They are under pressure.

SUSTAINABILITY
The business of sustainability: McKinsey Global Survey results
More companies are managing sustainability to improve processes, pursue growth, and create value, our latest survey indicates. A related opinion piece argues that businesses can no longer disconnect sustainability from core strategy.

ENERGY
Winning the battle for the home of the future
European utilities may soon have to earn a growing share of their profits by helping households to save and not just consume energy. Be sure to see the accompanying interactive exhibit, which shows how existing technologies can reduce the amount of energy that homes consume from the grid.

Special package: The quest for new business models in European banking
Unsettled times in European private banking

What’s the future of mobile banking in Europe?

Europe’s struggling asset managers

Also new
The savvy executive’s guide to buying back shares

America’s slumping consumer confidence

What Matters:
Digital marketing
New forms of media. Innovative technologies. Fractured audiences. The golden age of the 30-second TV commercial has given way to messages carefully crafted for an audience of one, billboards that talk back, and marketers who often know more about us—where we are, what we believe, and whom we talk to—than our best friends do. Teaming up with theAtlantic.com, What Matters takes a look at marketing’s new golden age.

Chart Focus
What women in business want
Although women generate about a quarter of US GDP, they contribute less than they could—too few of them move up the corporate ladder, for example, but not because they lack ambition. A McKinsey survey of 2,500 college-educated people found that women who make the leap from entry-level jobs to middle management and on to senior management are not only increasingly interested in becoming leaders but also increasingly confident that they can.

The Quarterly for iPad and Android tablets
We now publish a complimentary tablet edition (iPad or Android version 2.2 or higher) through the online digital newsstand–bookstore Zinio. If you don’t have a supported tablet, you can read the Quarterly on a PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android phone. Not sure how to access our iPad edition? Please visit mckinseyquarterly.com for step-by-step directions. Readers who aren’t Zinio subscribers can join and access the Quarterly after a free one-time registration.

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