1、July 2025Strategy&Corporate Finance PracticeHow Strategy Champions winOnly one in five companies believe they have high-quality strategy.What do such Strategy Champions have in common?They excel at designing bold strategiesand are even better at mobilizing their execution.This article is a collabora
2、tive effort by Alejandro Krell,Alex DAmico,Andy West,Dago Diedrich,and Michael Birshan,with Antoine Montard and Whitney Zimmerman,representing views from McKinseys Strategy&Corporate Finance Practice.Crafting a strategythe process of making coherent,hard-to-reverse choices under uncertainty with the
3、 aim of building long-term valuehas always been demanding.In 2010,only 35 percent of more than 2,000 surveyed executives reported that their strategies passed four or more of McKinseys Ten Tests of Strategy1(see sidebar“The Ten Tests of Strategy:Assess your strategys quality”).The increasing uncerta
4、inty and complexity of the business environment have made that task even harder.The World Uncertainty Index shows baseline uncertainty more than doubling since 1990,high-uncertainty events occurring more often,and each major spike being more severe than its predecessor(Exhibit 1).2 The challenge of
5、navigating uncertainty is compounded by growing complexityfrom the rapid advance of AI to geopolitical tensions to the emergence of new business and operating modelsthat multiplies the variables that strategists must consider.1 Chris Bradley,Martin Hirt,and Sven Smit,“Have you tested your strategy l
6、ately?,”McKinsey Quarterly,January 1,2011.2 World Uncertainty Index database,World Uncertainty Index,updated April 4,2025.Exhibit 1World Uncertainty Index,quarterly1 1Index measures global uncertainty by analyzing country reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit.The chart shows the unbalanced GD