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Rewired
The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI
by Eric Lamarre
A Summary by StoryShots
You get what you measure. So measure what actually matters.
Introduction
Your company just spent millions on new technology. Six months later, nothing has changed. The software sits unused. Teams work around it. That is not a technology problem. That is an organizational problem. Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI by Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Rodney Zemmel shows why digital transformation fails 70% of the time and what the successful 30% do differently.
Break the Barriers Between Teams
Most companies organize work in silos. Marketing sits in one building. Engineering in another. Product teams meet once a quarter. Then leadership announces a digital transformation and expects these disconnected groups to suddenly collaborate. When a customer-facing team needs a feature built, they submit a request to IT. IT adds it to a six-month backlog. By the time the feature ships, the market has moved on. You are competing against organizations where product managers, engineers, and designers sit together and ship updates weekly. "The distance between idea and execution determines who wins." This is already costing you customers today. While you are scheduling alignment meetings, your competitors are testing solutions with real users.
Replace Meetings With Talent Density
Traditional companies solve problems with process. Someone makes a mistake, so leadership adds a review step. Soon every decision requires four approvals and three committees. High performers leave. You are left with people comfortable with bureaucracy. The companies beating you have flipped the model. Instead of controlling mediocre talent with process, they hire exceptional people and get out of their way. They put senior engineers on the same team as senior designers and senior product managers. They give that team a clear outcome, access to data, and decision-making authority. "Hire the best, then remove everything that slows them down." Hiring great people costs less than losing market share because your organization cannot execute.
Measure Outcomes Not Activity
Most companies track digital transformation with activity metrics: project completion rates, lines of code shipped, tickets closed. None of them measure whether customers are better off or whether the business is winning. A team can ship fifty features and still lose customers if they are building the wrong things. The rewired approach measures differently. Pick the business outcome that matters most. Revenue from new products. Time from sign-up to first value. Customer retention after ninety days. Then restructure teams around moving that number. Give them full ownership of the entire stack required to change the outcome. Now they have skin in the game. If the number does not move, they cannot blame another department. When teams see their work directly moving metrics executives care about, motivation becomes self-sustaining. "You get what you measure. So measure what actually matters." If you know someone navigating a digital transformation, send them this summary.
Final Summary
This summary of Rewired connects three insights into one argument: digital transformation fails when you treat it as a technology upgrade instead of an organizational rewire. Silos kill speed. Weak talent requires bureaucracy. Activity metrics hide failure. But the book goes deeper. You need to know how to restructure a thousand-person organization without destroying morale. You need the specific meeting rhythms high-performing teams use. You need the playbook for migrating legacy systems while shipping new features weekly. Lamarre maps out the six-month plan McKinsey used with companies that actually succeeded, including the exact operating model changes that separated winners from the 70% who failed. The full summary of Rewired, along with a visual infographic and animated video, is in the StoryShots app.
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