Best of Bain 2024

The globalized world is going post-global. Every executive must now examine where their commerce crosses borders and scenario-plan for specific tariffs. The specter of tariffs is forcing every company to quite literally map their dependencies, and prompting execs to revise their world views, in more ways than one.

Mobilize your company around three imperatives:

Read, 6 min

Everyone has opinions about AI, but we are much more interested in where they put their money—in particular, where leaders invest compared to laggards. Our most recent quarterly survey found 99% of leaders feel AI is a priority next year, with half ranking it in their Top Three. Much of this is driven by fear of competition, and the unknown—3 in 4 consider generative AI a significant risk that will disrupt their industry. And while it is still more common to build rather than buy AI technology, those who outperform are more likely to buy.

Read, 4 min

Over the past decade, something has gone wrong with corporate transformations. In 2013, 38% of transformations failed outright. Those leaders bled, but ultimately moved on. In 2023 only 13% failed outright, yet this did not translate into more successes. Projects were far more likely to enter that fatal twilight of mediocrity and stay there, because leaders refused to admit defeat. Fifty percent more projects ended inconclusively, locking people and capital in limbo.

This is not what bold leaders do. There are six actions you can take to follow the model of Dell Technologies, which saw 10x growth over that same period.

Read, 10 min

A curious thing happened in the early 2000s: Venture funding produced more household name companies—the not-so-mythical “unicorns”—that reached $1 billion in market cap faster than unicorns founded in the 1970s and ’80s. But fewer of that recent generation have reached the critical milestone we call “scale insurgency” ($10 billion in revenue and $1 billion in cash). In other words, while more funding was available, it didn’t necessarily produce sustainable growth. Perhaps the capital-raising environment that created so many unicorns also undermined those founders’ business fundamentals.

Read, 6 min

As CEOs deal with an increasing number of sweeping, systemic challenges, climate concerns are at risk of moving down the priority list. But the fiscal rewards of building a sustainable company are as great as ever, as proven by a careful study of past technological cycles.

Our analysis suggests sustainable technologies such as renewables are approaching a tipping point. Value-minded leaders would be wise to not abandon their targets.

Read, 10 min

Many companies were caught flat-footed by Covid-19, but not

H-E-B, the regional Texas supermarket chain. How did its leaders know, in mid-January 2020, to ask their Chinese suppliers about the unfolding situation? How were they already running tabletop simulations by February? And why did 800 corporate employees volunteer for warehouse shifts when demand spiked?

Some companies are more adaptable than others, and in the current post-global environment, there’s a playbook you can run to join them: Map exposures, model scenarios, allocate capital, and invest in a culture that is sensitive to early signals.

Read, 11 min

In ten years’ time, Hugh MacArthur, Chairman of our Global Private Equity Practice, foresees investors turning their attention far more to private markets. “People are less happy with putting money into public markets. If you take the United States, for example, there are half the issues to invest in compared to 15–20 years ago.”

The private markets are many times larger than public ones. Hugh believes people will want to be in that 10% of capital chasing 90% of possible opportunities. “The room for growth [here] is absolutely massive.”

Listen, 21 min

How do you keep a sense of entrepreneurship in a company that is, by the nature of its own success, growing bureaucratic? How do you fight growing commoditization as you scale? How, one might ask, do you connect a company’s purpose to its strategy to its operating model?

Answers from seven CEOs and executives at Pizza Hut, Flipkart, Microsoft, and more

Watch, 5 min