Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st Century Organization

Based on a decade of exclusive research, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce of McKinsey & Company have come up with a simple yet revolutionary conclusion: Your workforce is the key to growth in the 21st century. By tapping into their underutilized talents, knowledge, and skills you can earn tens of thousands of additional dollars per employee, and manage the interdepartmental complexities and barriers that prevent real achievements and profits.

This can only be accomplished through organizational design and redesign. That's the new model for survival in the modern, digital, global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to any market change, leverage any opportunity, and sail past the competition.

In Mobilizing Minds, the authors distill their research into seven strategic ideas that shatter the complexity frontiers, have the potential to unleash enormous profits, and enable long-term success for every company. Bryan and Joyce outline innovative principles that enable corporations to:

• Manage complexity, bureaucracy, and redundancy
• Use hierarchical authority to strengthen the authority of key managers and drive performance
• Deliver operating earnings while implementing wealth-creation strategies
• Allow formal networks, talent, and knowledge marketplaces to work in a large company
• Motivate and reward wealth-creating behavior
• Pursue organizational design as a corporate strategy
• Increase worker satisfaction

It is imperative for corporations to put the same energy used for new products and processes into organizational design. That's where the money is. That's where the opportunities lie. That's the key to surviving and prospering in the 21st century.

Claudia I. Joyce is a Principal at McKinsey & Company and a core member of the Financial Services and Strategy Practices. Her work has been published on McKinsey's Knowledge Web and in the McKinsey Quarterly. She is a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (MBA) and of the University of Chicago (B.A. in Economics).

Harvard MBA Lowell L. Bryan is a Director (Senior Partner) at McKinsey & Company. Over the past 30 years, he has spoken and written extensively on strategy, organization, and financial services. Bryan has been a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has had articles published in numerous periodicals, including the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly, and has authored or coauthored several other books.

Claudia I. Joyce is a Principal at McKinsey & Company and a core member of the Financial Services and Strategy Practices. Her work has been published on McKinsey's Knowledge Web and in the McKinsey Quarterly. She is a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (MBA) and of the University of Chicago (B.A. in Economics).