Page 27 - The McKinsey Mind

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Framing the Problem 5

ple. I think just focusing people on that has allowed me to
add value.
Many highly successful organizations don’t apply structured
thought even to their core competencies, as Paul Kenny describes
at GlaxoSmithKline:

From a scientific point of view, a lot of the research organi-
zation is rather serendipity led: you invest in research, you
may have a direction, but often that direction will change
as a result of information you find. Some of the best drugs
on the market today were found more by luck than by
design. Then, thinking back, we realize that we could have
redesigned these clinical trials in a way to shape the product
more appropriately for the market. There are concrete exam-
ples of ways to increase value by making more-commercial
marketing decisions earlier on in the pipeline, and designing
products from the very beginning to have the right charac-
teristics, rather than just letting them evolve from the R&D
pipeline however they emerge.

If structured thinking is hard to find at GE and GlaxoSmith-
Kline, two of the world’s most respected and successful companies,
one can imagine that it may be a pretty rare coin in many
organizations.
Further complicating matters, the corporate cultures of some
organizations have been imbued with the wrong types of structure.
In another example from GlaxoSmithKline, a linear, deductive
thought process got in the way of sound decision making:

We have a project leader who wants to switch his drug from
its current twice-a-day formulation to a once-a-day formu-
lation. The drug is at an early stage in research, and it’s a