McKinsey Future of Asia

What core behaviors and governing mindsets guide Asia’s highest-performing owner-CEOs? In this episode, host Jennifer Chiang speaks with Joydeep Sengupta, a McKinsey senior partner and co-founder of the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence, about the interviews behind his new book, Shapers and Founders: The Untold Stories of Asia's Extraordinary Owner-CEOs, co-authored with Gautam Kumra and Cheryl Lim.  

After a year of conversations with the region's top entrepreneurs, Sengupta reflects on the ideas that stayed with him, from their ability to hold contradictory ideas at once to a hiring philosophy built on character over resume. He traces these traits back to centuries-old regional philosophies fused with Western management practice. What would change if more leaders adopted an owner mindset, wherever they sit in a company? 

Shapers and Founders: The Untold Stories of Asia’s Extraordinary Owner-CEOs reveals the leadership strategies behind Asia’s highest-performing entrepreneur-led companies. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews and rigorous empirical research, this book reveals the core behaviors and governing mindsets that have powered Asia’s rise. To find out more and preorder, visit www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/shapers-and-founders.

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Across Asia, founder-led companies create outsized value compared with professional CEOs. Is this edge something founders are born with or something they build? In this episode, host Jennifer Chiang speaks with Cheryl Lim, a McKinsey partner based in the Kuala Lumpur office and co-author of Shapers and Founders: The Untold Stories of Asia’s Extraordinary Owner-CEOs.

Drawing on interviews with founders across the region, Lim reflects on the traits that recur regardless of industry or background: curiosity, a commitment to relationship-building, and the ability to hold a big-picture vision and daily execution in mind at once. 

Shapers and Founders: The Untold Stories of Asia’s Extraordinary Owner-CEOs reveals the leadership strategies behind Asia’s highest-performing entrepreneur-led companies. Deriving insights from hours of interviews and rigorous empirical research, this book reveals the core behaviors and governing mindsets that have powered Asia’s rise. To find out more and preorder, visit www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/shapers-and-founders.

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On average, people are living longer than before, raising a broader conversation about how to create an ecosystem that effectively combines the delivery of care with proven ways to prevent illness. 

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Global spending on climate adaptation is running at roughly a third of what protecting everyone exposed today would require. At 2°C of warming, the gap widens further still. The economic case for closing it is strong, and yet investment remains far short of what the science demands

In this episode, host Debbi Cheong speaks with Mekala Krishnan, co-author of McKinsey Global Institute’s Advancing Adaptation report, and Yuito Yamada, Senior Partner at McKinsey. Together they examine where the adaptation gap is largest, why heat and drought account for more than three quarters of spending needs, and how Asia sits at the centre of the challenge.

The return on adaptation investment is clear: the spend on resilience today returns roughly three times its cost in avoided damage, rising to seven as hazards worsen. The long-term value is clear, so what will it take to translate that case into action at the scale the problem demands?

Read the report on the McKinsey Global Institute website here: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/advancing-adaptation-mapping-costs-from-cooling-to-coastal-defenses

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Foreign direct investment is increasingly being channeled into future-shaping industries, reconfiguring trade networks.

In this Future of Asia Podcast episode, host Debbi Cheong talks to McKinsey experts Jeongmin Seong and Tiago Devesa, two of the authors of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, The FDI shake-up: How foreign direct investment today may shape industry and trade tomorrow, about the impact of new FDI announcements globally. They focus on Asia, which accounts for about 50 percent of global trade flows, and its central role in the new configurations of trade.

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Governments and health systems across Asia aspire to shift toward proactive, preventive care. Yet historically, prevention budgets and policies haven’t matched the rhetoric, leaving reactive treatment models dominant.

Today, a new era of change is emerging — from public health initiatives and infrastructure planning to pharmaceutical and wearable-driven innovation — signaling that prevention and treatment are on track to converge for better outcomes. Can Asia become the first region to truly integrate prevention and innovation at scale?

 In this episode, host Debbi Cheong is joined by Hemant Ahlawat, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company in Zurich, and Panco Georgiev, Senior Partner in Dubai.

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Narayana Murthy, founder of Indian technology services and consulting giant, Infosys, discusses the vital role that respect and compassion play for him in being a successful business lead

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Cutting-edge technologies present exciting possibilities for organizations, but their full potential needs to be unlocked. 

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Narayana Murthy, founder of Indian technology services and consulting giant, Infosys, discusses the vital role that respect and compassion play for him in being a successful business leader.

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Biotech entrepreneurs across Asia are navigating funding gaps, weak innovation ecosystems, and unpredictable regulatory systems. For many, these challenges make it difficult to scale science-led businesses and deliver affordable healthcare solutions.

In this episode, host Gautam Kumra, Chairman of McKinsey Asia, sits down with Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Founder & Chairperson, Biocon Group. They discuss how she overcame a lack of funding, limited infrastructure, and regulatory hurdles to build one of Asia’s first and most successful biotech companies — pioneering affordable biosimilars, shaping biotech policy in India, and scaling purpose-driven innovation from the ground up.

The episode also features McKinsey partner Cheryl SH Lim, and Director of Learning, CEO Institute, Jennifer Chiang.

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