Inside the Strategy Room

As millions of baby boomer business owners in the United States approach retirement, the country faces a major transition in business ownership. Over the next decade, millions of small and midsize businesses could be sold, transferred, or closed, with major implications for local economies, jobs, family wealth, and economic mobility.
In this episode, we hear from partner Ken Yearwood and associate partner Nick Noel about the wave of business transfers on the horizon, the scale of the opportunity, and the risks of avoidable closures. They discuss what this transition could mean for buyers, sellers, private capital, employees, and rural communities, and explore how a broader and more inclusive ownership ecosystem could unlock long-term value.
Related insights
The Great Ownership Transfer: A new era of business stewardship
McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility
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In this episode, we explore how finance leaders can harness AI to drive performance and create value for the organization. Our guests—Kevin Carmody, Davide Grande, and Andrea Tricoli—share insights from their research, highlighting how AI is reshaping finance functions across strategic planning, cost management, risk mitigation, and investor relations. Join us as we delve into real-world examples of AI in action and consider the evolving role of the CFO as a strategic partner in the C-Suite.
Related insights
How finance teams are putting AI to work today
Gen AI: A guide for CFOs
Gen AI in corporate functions: Looking beyond efficiency gains
Spendscape by McKinsey: Next-level spend analytics software powered by AI

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Private equity firms have long outperformed their peers—not just through financial engineering, but by building better businesses faster. In this episode, senior partner Sacha Ghai and partner Marla Capozzi discuss what leaders across sectors can learn from the highest-performing private equity CEOs. Drawing on their recent Harvard Business Review article, Sacha and Marla unpack the concept of CEO alpha: the value created when CEOs outperform as individual leaders, team builders, and operators. They explain why private equity’s edge has shifted from financial engineering to building stronger, more resilient businesses, and they share six practices that distinguish top-performing PE CEOs.
Related insights
What Every Company Can Learn from Private Equity
CEO alpha: A new approach to generating private equity outperformance
CEO Excellence: The six mindsets that distinguish the best leaders from the rest
A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership
The Strategic CEO
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Generative AI is reshaping the way investors evaluate opportunities and replacing much of the manual work involved in completing an outside-in diligence. Firms that adapt the fastest during this transition have the most to gain. To discuss how the deployment of gen AI in diligence can give organizations an investment edge and explore the shift from traditional diligence to AI-enabled, outside-in analysis we’re joined by David Pralong, a senior partner and the global leader of our Transformation Practice, William Bundy, a partner in our Washington D.C office, Chase Covington, a partner based in our New York office, and Laura Borton, a consultant also based in our New York office.
Related Insights
From potential to performance: Using gen AI to conduct outside-in diligence
Creating Value in Portfolio Company Operations: A Practical Guide to Growing Cash Flow in Business
Wave: Your path to unprecedented performance
McKinsey insights on transformation
McKinsey insights on Strategy and Corporate Finance
McKinsey Transformation on LinkedIn
McKinsey Strategy and Corporate Finance on LinkedIn
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Generative and agentic AI are moving rapidly from experimentation to enterprise-wide transformation—but many CEOs are still grappling with what this really means for their business.
In this episode, McKinsey experts Tanguy Catlin, Sandra Durth, Lari Hämäläinen, and Antoine Montard examine why AI is being viewed as a true general-purpose technology, on par with past breakthroughs like electricity and the internet, and what that implies for competition, investment, and long-term value creation.

We discuss the importance of thinking across strategy, technology, and organization to maximize the value from AI—and why focusing on productivity alone may not be enough to win.
We also unpack the practical challenges leaders face and how to address them including redesigning workflows and operating models, managing large-scale workforce transitions, and building the skills and organizational capabilities needed to capture AI’s full potential.
Related insights
The agentic AI opportunity
Building the foundations for agentic AI at scale
Seizing the agentic AI advantage
A Century of Plenty
New MIT Sloan research suggests that AI is more likely to complement, not replace, human workers
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