The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends

Richard Dobbs, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, explains how we will have to recalibrate our thinking about leadership skills and executive careers to adapt to the economic disruption of the future. 

In No Ordinary Disruption you outline the four global forces that will underpin the next 50 years of economic activity, with each one being greater in significance than the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. It is fascinating, but how do you propose people interpret these predictions and adapt accordingly?

There is a set of capabilities that you need to start building in order to deal with this huge disruption. Firstly, you must be externally focused, so that you understand the changing world around you. Secondly, you need to build agility into your organization to adapt quickly to the changes that you observe. Finally, you have to have a positive outlook. These disruptions will create a lot of opportunity that an optimist will identify, whereas pessimists will only see the damage to their existing business model. To spot this opportunity, there needs to be more reliance on data and analysis, and less on intuition.

We read about how the pressure on CEOs in particular continues to rise. There have been a number of high-profile instances of chief executives having to take time off due to stress or workload pressures. The trends that you have identified appear to be underway and the ground seems to be moving under the feet of a lot of sitting CEOs. What do they need to do to adjust today, let alone during the next 50 years?

The CEO role of the past is now impossible to do. The challenge for the CEO is to think about building a team. They need to have a strong CFO who can pick up a lot more of the work that the CEO would have done historically, whether that’s resource allocation, where you put your talent, or where you put your M&A money.

And as we think about how the world will change, there will be a need for a different set of skills. The CEO will need a really good HR Director who understands Big Data and can identify and attract the best talent. The talent pool isn’t big enough for this if you’re only looking at HR Directors. You have to look at existing business leaders who have a track record for people leadership and move them over.

We often hear that international experience is beneficial for an executive. Two of the disruptive forces you identify are technology and great connectivity, which will continue to make the world a smaller place. Will executives and executive search consultants have to look at careers differently in the future?

Successful executives will need to do three things very well. Firstly, they are going to need a much better sense of technology and how disruptive it will be. Secondly, customers and investors are going to be from emerging markets. It will be very hard to operate without knowing what is happening in these markets. Thirdly, the nature of people’s jobs will change during their lifetime. For example, radio took 38 years to reach 50 million people, so seasoned print journalists didn’t have to adapt to it. Twitter took nine months to reach 50 million people. With the way that technology is disrupting things, employees will need to retrain in their lifetime. Building the DNA to learn new skills is going to be much more important.

You describe how in the decades ahead, half of the world’s economic growth will come from 440 cities – and many of these, like Kumasi in Ghana or Santa Catarina in Brazil, would be difficult for today’s executives to identify on a map. Professional services can often struggle to establish a footprint in emerging economics as the clients are not accustomed to paying for services, rather than products. What advice would you give to executive search firms in light of the moving economic center of gravity?

Executive search is not the only service sector that faces this problem. We have to educate our clients and prove ourselves in these markets, in the same way that investment banks and law firms have to. My advice is to find a few high profile companies, conduct a search on their terms, but make it very clear that you are doing it at a different price. If they come away from the experience and understand the value of your work, then you’ve made your point.

No Ordinary DisruptionExclusive Excerpt from No Ordinary Disruption

The McKinsey Global Institute’s latest book outlines four global trends for the future of business, each one more significant than the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. Below is an exclusive extract from the opening chapter, called ‘An Intuition Reset’.

Managing a complex organization isn’t easy in the best of times. It’s especially difficult when the news continually reminds you that everything you thought you knew about how the world works seems to be…wrong. Or at least a little off. Dramatic changes come from nowhere, and then from everywhere. Major shifts can blindside even the most circumspect among us — first slowly, and then all at once. The fortunes of industries, companies, products, technologies, and even countries and cities rise and fall overnight and in completely unpredictable ways. Just consider some of the ways in which events on the ground have upended long-held assumptions, longterm projections, and basic beliefs about how things are supposed to work in the global economy:

• For years, the global retailing industry looked to American consumers, the most powerful and prolific in the world, as a proxy for the health of global shoppers. On Cyber Monday — the day after the Thanksgiving weekend — the media provided saturation coverage of the annual e-commerce binge. On December 1, 2014, Americans spent a record $2.65 billion online. However, just weeks before, a much more significant online shopping bomb exploded. November 11 (11.11) is China’s Singles Day — an unofficial holiday that has rapidly become a contrived occasion for consumption. Conceived in the 1990s by single college students as an anti- Valentine’s Day, it is now an occasion for conspicuous online shopping in the world’s second-largest economy. On November 11, 2014, Alibaba, China’s biggest e-tailer, recorded sales of more than $9.3 billion, a record for a single day anywhere in the world.

• In October 2013, the US Energy Information Administration made a stunning announcement. The United States, until recently an energy hog struggling with declining fossil fuel production, would surpass Russia as the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons in 2013. Yes, production of natural gas and oil had been rising sharply, thanks to the advent of fracking. But the pace of growth took the agency by surprise. Just a year before, it had projected that the United States wouldn’t surpass Russia until 2020. In North Dakota alone, oil production increased twelvefold between 2004 and 2014, helping to reverse a decades-long decline in population.

• On February 19, 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, a five-year old startup, for a stunning $19 billion. The instant-messaging app, started in mid- 2009 by two former Yahoo employees, had enlisted 450 million users — more than Twitter and more than the entire population of the United States. But many Wall Street bankers weren’t familiar with the company. The free mobile-messaging application had its greatest appeal — and greatest number of users — in emerging markets. Facebook was able to easily afford the massive price thanks to its successful, swift pivot into mobile. From essentially zero in early 2012, Facebook grew its mobile advertising to 66 percent of total advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2014.

• On September 24, 2014, the world took in a familiar scene of jubilant scientists at a mission control center celebrating a technical achievement. But this was different. The control center was in southern India, not southern Texas. And many of the scientists wore brightly colored saris. The team at the Indian Space Research Organization was celebrating its successful placement of a spacecraft into orbit around Mars. “We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed, taking his rhetorical cues from Star Trek. “We have dared to reach into the unknown.” The most astonishing feature of the venture may have been its cost: a mere $74 million. Modi noted that the whole effort cost less than Hollywood spent making the science-fiction film Gravity. Aloft for nearly a year, the Mangalyaan was the embodiment of India’s culture of frugal innovation. Using lightweight instruments, employing components adapted from other uses, and applying engineering prowess to bring down costs, India managed to become just the fourth country whose space organization successfully placed a spacecraft in Mars’s orbit—and the first country to do so on its first attempt.

These big, important stories incorporate common threads that are by turns bewildering and delightful. Speed, surprise, and sudden shifts in direction in huge global markets routinely impact the destinies of established companies and provide opportunities for new entrants.

In fact, ours is a world of near-constant discontinuity. Competitors can rise in almost complete stealth and burst upon the scene. Businesses that were protected by large and deep moats find that their defenses are easily breached. Vast new markets are conjured seemingly from nothing. Technology and globalization have accelerated and intensified the natural forces of market competition. Longterm trend lines, once reliably smooth, now more closely resemble sawtooth mountain ridges, hockey sticks (a plateau followed by a steep ascent), or the silhouette of Mount Fuji (rising steadily, then falling off). Five years is an eternity.

This new normal — a world in which China leads the globe in holiday consumption, the United States is the largest oil producer, a mobile messaging app is worth $19 billion, and India is a leader in space exploration — presents difficult, often existential challenges to leaders of companies, organizations, cities, and countries. The formative experiences of many senior leaders came during a period that was uniquely benign and placid for the global economy. With good reason, the twenty-five years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis came to be known, in the words of economists James Stock and Mark Watson, as the “Great Moderation.” Interest rates fell, helping to drive up the price of assets, whether stocks, bonds, or houses. Natural resources became ever more abundant and cheaper. Jobs were plentiful, and a seemingly endless supply of trained workers stood ready to fill them. When technology and trade disrupted and upended industries, most of those affected were able to find work in other sectors. As surely as night followed day, the value of our homes and investments rose each and every year. In developed economies, parents generally assumed that their children, upon becoming adults, would be more prosperous than they were. Whatever consumers and governments couldn’t afford to buy with cash, they could pay for with borrowed funds. There were blips and bumps along the road, to be sure, but by and large, the tale of the Great Moderation was one of continuity and persistent trends.

That familiar world is no more. The financial crisis of 2008, the deepest economic contraction since the Great Depression, and a host of disruptive technologies, trends, and developments have conspired to ruffle the calm. Many of the long-standing trends that made life so pleasant for investors and managers during the Great Moderation have broken decisively. After nearly three decades, in which interest rates fell, the cost of capital cannot get cheaper, and it could rise over the next twenty years. After a prolonged period of falling and steady prices for natural resources, the cost of everything from grain to steel is becoming more volatile. The demographic surplus the world enjoyed as working-age populations grew and China joined the global trading system is likely to turn into a demographic deficit as population growth grinds to a halt and the world’s labor force ages.

Although inequality between countries continues to shrink, in many parts of the world, individuals — particularly those with low job skills — are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.

That’s just the beginning.

A radically different world is forming. The operating system of the world’s economy is being rewritten as we speak. It doesn’t come out in a splashy new release. It evolves, unfolds, and often explodes.

Four Great Disruptive Forces

We believe that the world is now roughly in the middle of a dramatic transition as a result of four fundamental disruptive trends. Any one of these disruptions, by itself, would probably rank among the largest economic forces the global economy has ever seen—including industrial revolutions in advanced economies. Although we all know that these disruptions are happening, most of us fail to comprehend their full magnitude and the second and third order effects that will result. Much as waves can amplify one another, these trends are gaining strength, magnitude, and influence as they interact with, coincide with, and feed upon one another. Together, they are producing monumental change.

The first is the shifting locus of economic activity and dynamism — to emerging markets like China and to cities within those markets. The emerging markets are going through the simultaneous industrial and urban revolutions that began in the nineteenth century in the developed world. The balance of power of the world economy is shifting east and south at a speed never before witnessed. As recently as 2000, 95 percent of the Fortune Global 500 — the world’s largest international companies, including Shell, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nestle, and Airbus, to name a few — were headquartered in developed economies. By 2025, when China will be home to more large companies than either the United States or Europe, we expect nearly half of the world’s large companies — defined as those with revenues of $1 billion or more — will come from emerging markets. “Over the years, people in our headquarters, in Frankfurt, started complaining to me, ‘We don’t see you much around here anymore,’” said Josef Ackermann, the former chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank. “Well, there was a reason why: growth has moved elsewhere — to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.”

Perhaps equally important, the locus of economic activity is shifting within these markets. The global urban population has been rising by an average of sixty-five million people over the last three decades, equivalent to adding seven Chicagos a year, every year. Nearly half of global GDP growth between 2010 and 2025 will come from 440 cities in emerging markets — 95 percent of them small- and mediumsized cities that many Western executives may not even have heard of and couldn’t point to on a map. Mumbai, Dubai, and Shanghai, yes. But also Hsinchu, in northern Taiwan, which is already the fourth-largest advanced electronics and high-tech hub in the China region. And Brazil’s Santa Catarina state, halfway between São Paulo and the Uruguayan border, which is now a regional hub for electronics and vehicle manufacturing and home to billion-dollar companies such as WEG Industrias SA. And Tianjin, a city that lies around 120 kilometers southeast of Beijing. In 2010, we estimated that the GDP of Tianjin was around $130 billion, making it around the same size as Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. By 2025, we estimate that the GDP of Tianjin will have risen to around $625 billion—approximately that of all of Sweden.

The second disruptive force is the acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology. Technology — from the printing press to the steam engine and the Internet — has always been a great force in overturning the status quo. The difference today is the sheer ubiquity of technology in our lives and the speed of change. In their bestseller The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dubbed the current era the “second half of the chessboard.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee give a modern twist to an old story about the power of exponential growth. Pleased with the invention of chess, a Chinese emperor offered the inventor his choice of prizes. At the outset, the inventor asked the emperor for a single grain of rice to be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second square, four on the third, and eight on the fourth. The amounts doubled with each move. The first half of the chessboard was fairly uneventful. The inventor received spoons of rice, then bowls, then barrels. One version of the story has the emperor going bankrupt and being replaced by the inventor, as sixty- three doublings would have ultimately totaled eighteen million trillion grains of rice — enough to cover twice the surface area of the earth. “There have been slightly more than thirty-two doublings of performance since the first programmable computers were invented during World War II,” the futurist and computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil has noted. As fast as innovation has multiplied and spread in recent years, it is poised to change and grow at an exponential speed beyond the power of human intuition to anticipate.

Processing power and connectivity are only part of the story. Their impact is multiplied by the concomitant data revolution, which places unprecedented amounts of information in the hands of consumers and businesses alike, and the proliferation of technology-enabled business models, from online retail platforms like Alibaba to car-hailing apps like Uber. Thanks to these mutually amplifying forces, more and more people will enjoy a golden age of gadgetry, of instant communication, and of apparently boundless information. Technology offers the promise of economic progress for billions in emerging economies at a speed that would have been unimaginable without the mobile Internet. Barely twenty years ago, less than 3 percent of the world’s population had a mobile phone and less than 1 percent were on the Internet. Today, two-thirds of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone and one-third of all humans are able to communicate on the Internet. Technology allows businesses to start and gain scale with stunning speed while using little capital, as WhatsApp did. Entrepreneurs and startups now frequently enjoy advantages over large, established businesses. The furious pace of technological adoption and innovation is shortening the lifecycle of companies and forcing executives to make decisions and commit resources much more quickly.

The third force changing the world is demographics. Simply put, the human population is getting older. Birth rates are declining and the world’s population is graying dramatically. Aging has been evident in developed economies for some time. Japan and Russia have seen their populations decline over the past few years. The demographic deficit is now spreading to China and will then sweep across Latin America. For the first time in human history, aging could mean that the planet’s population plateaus in most of the world. Thirty years ago, only a small share of the global population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below those needed to replace each generation — 2.1 children per woman. But by 2013, about 60 percent of the world’s population lived in countries with fertility rates below the replacement rate. This is a sea change. The European Commission expects that by 2060, Germany’s population will shrink by one-fifth, and the number of people of working age will fall from fifty-four million in 2010 to thirty-six million in 2060, a level that is forecast to be less than France’s. China’s labor force peaked in 2012, due to income-driven demographic trends. In Thailand, the fertility rate has fallen from 5 in the 1970s to 1.4 today. A smaller workforce will place a greater onus on productivity for driving growth and may cause us to rethink the economy’s potential. Caring for large numbers of elderly people will put severe pressure on government finances.

The final disruptive force is the degree to which the world is much more connected through trade and through movements in capital, people, and information — what we call “flows. Trade and finance have long been part of the globalization story. In recent decades, there’s been a significant shift. Instead of a series of lines connecting major trading hubs in Europe and North America, the global trading system has expanded into a complex, intricate, sprawling web. Asia is becoming the world’s largest trading region. “Southsouth” flows between emerging markets have doubled their share of global trade over the past decade. The volume of trade between China and Africa rose from $9 billion in 2000 to $211 billion in 2012. Global capital flows expanded twenty-five times between 1980 and 2007. More than one billion people crossed borders in 2009, over five times the number in 1980. These three types of connections all paused during the global recession of 2008 and have recovered only slowly since. But the links forged by technology have marched on uninterrupted and with increasing speed, ushering in a dynamic new phase of globalization, creating unmatched opportunities, and fomenting unexpected volatility.

Resetting Intuition

The four disruptions gathered pace, grew in scale, and started collectively to have a material impact on the world economy around the turn of the twenty- first century. Now they are disrupting long- established patterns in virtually every market and every sector of the world economy — indeed, in every aspect of our lives. Everywhere we look, they are causing trends to break down, to break up, or simply to break. The fact that all four are happening at the same time means that our world will change radically from the one in which many of us grew up, prospered, and formed the intuitions that are so vital to our decision making.

Discontinuities such as these could be seen as bringing only doom and gloom. But this would be wrong — by a long shot. Indeed, the same forces that lifted one billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010 will help propel another three billion people into the global middle class in the next two decades. This improvement in the economic status of so many people would save even more lives than the eradication of smallpox, one of the greatest medical achievements of the twentieth century. The rapid spread of technology will empower individuals and consumers in unprecedented numbers. Increasingly, companies will find that technology drives the marginal cost of delivering a new product, servicing a new customer, or completing a transaction toward zero. And as more people connect to the global communications and commercial systems, the force of network effects will make those systems more valuable — and create more value for those who can tap into them. As a result, the new world will be richer, more urbanized, more skilled, and healthier than the one it replaces. Its population will have access to powerful innovations that could address long-standing challenges, create new products and services for a growing consuming class, and present opportunities for a global entrepreneurial class. In many ways, we live in an age of recurring miracles.

These developments can play havoc with forecasts and pro forma plans that were made simply by extrapolating recent experience into the near and distant future. Many of the assumptions, tendencies, and habits that proved so successful have suddenly lost much of their resonance. We’ve never had more data and advice at our fingertips — literally. The iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy contains far more information and processing power than the original supercomputer. Yet we work in a world in which even, perhaps especially, professional forecasters are routinely caught unawares.

That’s partly because intuition still underpins much of our decision making. It’s human nature, and our intuition has been formed by a set of experiences and ideas about how things worked and are supposed to work. Changes were incremental and somewhat predictable. Globalization benefited the well-established and well connected, opening up new markets with relative ease. Labor markets functioned quite reliably. Resource prices fell. But that’s not how things are working now — and it’s not how they are likely to work in the future. If we look at the world through a rearview mirror and make decisions on the basis of the intuition built on our experience, we could well be wrong. In the new world, executives, policy makers, and individuals all need to scrutinize their intuitions from first principles and boldly reset them if necessary. This is especially true for organizations that have enjoyed great success.

We have to rethink the assumptions that drive our decisions on such crucial issues as consumption, resources, labor, capital, and competition. We shouldn’t discard experience and instinct, but rather augment them and adapt them to what we can see happening right ahead of us. We must think differently about strategy, constructing business plans, approaching markets, assessing competitors, and allocating resources.

The developed world used to drive consumption. As the huge, developed economies — Japan, the United States, Europe — went, so went growth in consumer spending. No longer. Now, the large new army of middle-class consumers in the emerging world propels global spending growth. China’s e-tail market, which has grown at a compounded annual rate of 110 percent since 2003, is already the world’s second largest, after that of the United States. By 2020, China’s e-tail market, led by Alibaba and the legions of Singles Day shoppers, could be as big as today’s markets in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France combined.

Commodity prices fell by almost half during the twentieth century in real terms, an astonishing development given that the global population quadrupled and global economic output expanded roughly twentyfold, massively boosting demand for different resources. Why? Technological breakthroughs opened up access to resources and increased the efficiency of extraction. Companies enjoyed lower raw materials costs. More and more households had access to relatively inexpensive and abundant energy and food. But that trend began to break in 2000. In the first ten years of the new century, the price declines of the previous one hundred years were completely erased as soaring demand from emerging economies coincided with depleted reserves of many resources. The US fracking boom notwithstanding, from grain to copper to oil, it is costing more to find, nurture, and harvest resources.

Thanks to the actions of central banks, a host of disinflationary pressures, slack investment in the developed world, and a rise in savings, for thirty years the cost of capital has fallen progressively — for governments, for companies, and for consumers. Between 1982 and 2013, the yield on the ten-year US government bond fell from 14.6 to 1.9 percent, a decline of 87 percent. This era of progressively easier money is very likely ending.

The US Federal Reserve has already started the process of tightening monetary policy. Emerging economies are in the throes of a capital-intensive infrastructure boom exceeding that of the rebuilding of wrecked economies in the aftermath of World War II. The surging demand for capital comes when the world’s savings are falling as people age and governments have to borrow more.

For decades the general trends were for the global labor force to rise and for more of the global labor force to be connected to the global system. What’s more, thanks to a rapidly expanding economy in emerging markets, the new hands were able to find places to work. Across the globe, employers were generally able to find employees with appropriate skills.

Between 1980 and 2010, 1.1 billion adults entered the twenty to sixty-four year old age bracket and joined the world’s labor force. But due to a host of demographic factors, global labor force growth will fall by nearly one-third by 2030. At the same time, technology is roiling labor markets as never before. Computers, which historically replaced manual and clerical workers, such as stenographers and bank tellers, are now beginning to replace knowledge and skilled workers, like journalists and stock analysts. By 2025, in fact, computers could do the work of 140 million knowledge workers, and robots could do the work of another 75 million people. And yet there will still be high demand for skilled positions in engineering, software development, and health care. Four out of ten respondents in a McKinsey survey reported that they currently couldn’t find the talent they need. This means that we’re likely to see a strange dichotomy. By 2020, on our current trajectory, businesses could be short of 85 million workers with college degrees or vocational training; at the same time, 95 million lower-skilled workers could be unemployed.

In the past, executives typically knew their main competitors at home and abroad, and they could often catch up to new competition that emerged. But competitive intensity has reached an entirely new level because of technology that gives the advantage to small, entrepreneurial companies over large, established businesses with high fixed costs. Today, new competition is coming from a wave of rapidly growing newcomers that are simply not on the strategic radar and that don’t appear on the radar until they have gained critical mass. These newcomers play by a different set of rules. They have much lower cost bases, faster time to market, a ruthless understanding of their Western competitors, and a willingness to accept lower returns. The market position of Unilever’s OMO laundry products in Kenya isn’t being challenged by Procter & Gamble. Rather, OMO is under attack from Toss, made by Kapa Oil Refi neries, Ltd., a Nairobi-based company that has shifted from industrial to consumer products.

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While it is full of opportunities, this era is deeply unsettling. And there is a great deal of work to be done — in resetting our collective intuition, in developing new approaches to high-growth markets, and in becoming more agile as a way of dealing with breaking trends. The chapters that follow build on the efforts to understand trends by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the economics and business research arm of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Our thinking stems from McKinsey’s work with companies and organizations around the world; meaningful conversations about the challenges and opportunities inherent in our world with corporate, government, and NGO leaders; deep, proprietary quantitative research by MGI over the last twenty-five years; and extensive and diverse personal experiences. One of us has lived in China for more than a quarter century, one of us has been based in Silicon Valley since 1993, and one of us has, since 1988, spent time in London, Mumbai, and Seoul. We have all been forced to continually reset our own intuition. The chapters that follow are divided into two broad sections. In the first four chapters, we describe the four great disruptive forces that are altering our world. In the final six chapters, we describe how you can — and should — respond to the challenges these forces present to key facets of modern leadership.

Analyzing the intelligence from these diverse sources and experiences has led us to the management imperative for the coming decade. Realize that much of what we thought we knew about how the world works is wrong. Get a handle on the disruptive forces transforming the global economy. Identify the long-standing trends that are breaking. Develop the courage and foresight to clear the intellectual decks and prepare to respond.

These are lessons that apply as much to policy makers as to business executives.

After all, urbanization, technology, and greater global connections are putting the same pressures on government that they are on business. In domains as diverse as labor, fiscal planning, trade, immigration, and resource and technology regulation, the emerging world will be exerting pressure on political, governmental, and NGO leaders and forcing them to reset their own intuitions. We’re not here simply to alert readers to perils or to flog the many wonderful opportunities that lie before us. Rather, we’ll offer guidance on how you can reset your internal navigation system.

That process can’t begin soon enough. In all the areas of the world economy that we discuss in this book, there is an urgent imperative to adjust to new realities. Yet, for all the ingenuity, inventiveness, and imagination of the human race, we tend to be slow to adapt to change. Behavioral economists throw around terms like recency bias and anchoring. Physicists point to the powerful force of inertia. Cynical analysts might refer to “pro forma disease” — because the last three years looked a certain way, the next five years will look much the same. However we identify it, there is a powerful human tendency to want the future to look much like the recent past. On these shoals, huge corporate vessels have repeatedly foundered. Revisiting our assumptions about the world we live in — and doing nothing — will leave many of us highly vulnerable. Gaining a cleareyed perspective on how to negotiate the changing landscape will help us prepare to succeed.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends

In No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the flagship think tank of the McKinsey & Company global management consulting firm, interpret masses of illuminating data from the MGI’s twenty-five years of research to guide us through the next two decades of a dramatically different future. With an urgent call to action to reset our intuition to an era of discontinuity, Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel dive deeply behind current headlines to analyze six emerging trends caused by four disruptive forces transforming the global economy.

Thank you to the McKinsey Global Institute and PublicAffairs for permission to republish this excerpt from No Ordinary Disruption.

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