No ordinary disruption: the four global forces breaking all the trends

Table of contents

Part I. The four disruptive forces
1. Beyond Shanghai: the age of urbanization
2. The tip of the iceberg: accelerating technological change
3. Getting old isn't what it used to be: responding to the challenges of an aging world
4. Trade, people, finance, and data: greater global connections

Part II. Intuition resets
5. The next three billion: tapping the power of the new consuming class
6. Reversing the cycle: resource opportunity
7. End of an era: farewell to increasingly cheaper capital?
8. The jobs gap: overcoming dislocation in the labor market
9. From minnows to sharks: rise of new competitors and a changing basis of competition
10. Policy matters: challenges for society and governance
Concluding thoughts

Our intuition on how the world works could well be wrong. We are surprised when new competitors burst on the scene, or businesses protected by large and deep moats find their defenses easily breached, or vast new markets are conjured from nothing. Trend lines resemble saw-tooth mountain ridges.
The world not only feels different. The data tell us it is different. Based on years of research by the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Forces Breaking all the Trends is a timely and important analysis of how we need to reset our intuition as a result of four forces colliding and transforming the global economy: the rise of emerging markets, the accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition, an aging world population, and accelerating flows of trade, capital and people.
Our intuitions formed during a uniquely benign period for the world economy — often termed the Great Moderation. Asset prices were rising, cost of capital was falling, labour and resources were abundant, and generation after generation was growing up more prosperous than their parents.
But the Great Moderation has gone. The cost of capital may rise. The price of everything from grain to steel may become more volatile. The world’s labor force could shrink. Individuals, particularly those with low job skills, are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.
What sets No Ordinary Disruption apart is depth of analysis combined with lively writing informed by surprising, memorable insights that enable us to quickly grasp the disruptive forces at work. For evidence of the shift to emerging markets, consider the startling fact that, by 2025, a single regional city in China — Tianjin — will have a GDP equal to that of the Sweden, of that, in the decades ahead, half of the world’s economic growth will come from 440 cities including Kumasi in Ghana or Santa Carina in Brazil that most executives today would be hard-pressed to locate on a map.
What we are now seeing is no ordinary disruption but the new facts of business life — facts that require executives and leaders at all levels to reset their operating assumptions and management intuition.

https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/richard-dobbs/no-ordinary-disruption/9781610397629/