Rewired: The Six Capabilities
McKinsey studied what separates digital and AI winners from the rest. The answer wasn't a single app or model — it was six capabilities, built together. Skip one and value leaks out.
Everyone wants the one move that makes them a digital winner. McKinsey went looking for it and found something less convenient: six capabilities that only work together.
The book Rewired answers a plain question: when a company actually wins with digital and AI — not in a press release, in its results — what did it do that the others didn't? The honest finding is that there's no single answer. It wasn't the flashiest model, the biggest cloud bill, or the most senior hire. It was six capabilities, built at the same time, reinforcing each other.
Plainly, the six are: a value-led roadmap (a plan tied to specific business value, not a list of technologies); talent (a critical mass of your own technical people); an operating model (small cross-functional teams that own outcomes); a technology environment that's distributed and easy to build on; data that's usable and embedded everywhere; and adoption (getting people to actually use what you built, at scale).
The reason this matters — and the reason most transformations underdeliver — is that the six form a system, and a system is capped by its weakest part. A brilliant model nobody adopts returns nothing. World-class talent with no clear roadmap builds impressive things that move no number. You don't get six independent bets where four hits cover one miss. You get a chain, and value leaks out wherever a link is thin.
A note on the edition. The first Rewired (2023) predates the agentic-AI era; the 2025 second edition adds a whole chapter on reimagining workflows with agents and roughly 40% new material. The six capabilities still hold — but the bar each must clear is higher now. This course teaches the six as they stand in the agentic era, not as they read before ChatGPT.
Where it goes wrong
Treating the six like a menu and ordering the one that's most fun — usually the technology. New platform, new model, big launch. But technology is one link; pouring effort into the link that's already strong while three others stay thin doesn't move the value in the middle at all.
Try this
Take one digital effort you know — yours or your company's — and rate each of the six capabilities behind it as strong, thin, or missing. Don't fix anything yet. Just find the thinnest link. That link, not the shiniest one, is where the value is leaking — and where the next eight lessons will pay off most.
Grounded in Lamarre, Smaje & Zemmel, Rewired (McKinsey, 2023; 2nd ed. 2025).