Vote for our SXSW 2021 PanelPicker ideas!

Sixteen McKinsey leaders are on the slate for potential speaking slots at SXSW 2021. Want to help get their ideas onto the agenda? Check out the proposals below, then click through to up-vote your favorites before voting ends on Friday, November 20:

Women step up: Succeeding in a male dominated world | Gayatri Shenai

To move the needle on gender diversity, women need to adopt a different mindset — one that chips away at the limitations a male-dominated status quo imposes. In this session, a panel of seasoned female CXOs will tell you how they did just that. They’ll explain how they took ownership of their careers, overcame personal and institutional bias, broke down organizational barriers, gained influence and rose to leadership roles — and how you can, too.

The tech forward agenda | Gayatri Shenai and Belkis Vasquez-McCall

Amid COVID-19, we have seen a rapid migration by employees and customers to digital technologies, driving companies to accelerate their digital capabilities and investments in technology to just stay afloat and remain competitive. This has made technology performance more critical than ever before to business success and has elevated the role of the IT function. In this journey, tech leaders are in a unique position to provide the support, leadership and partnership to transform IT’s role, resource model, and core systems, and to bring about the cultural and organizational changes necessary for their companies to compete. In this session, Gayatri and Belkis will talk through how tech leaders can position their companies for greater success in an economy where digital savvy is at a premium.

Technology’s next leadership imperative | Aamer Baig

In this session, Aamer Baig will discuss the “how” — how tech leaders can use this unique opportunity to drive both positive business and societal change but also reflect on the lessons learned from the tech industry’s journey of unabated growth.

Debunking cloud for a better tomorrow | Kate Smaje

In this session, we will explore how many of today’s beliefs about cloud are based on misconceptions that get in the way of deeply understanding the positive business, operational, and economic impacts of cloud. Our diverse panelists from both the public and private sector, will share their personal stories and experiences in leading their organizations to cloud and how you can, too.

Making boats fly with AI and culture at the helm | Jacomo Corbo

The America’s Cup is the oldest sports trophy in the world but above all is a technology competition. It is a race against time to design, test, and deliver the fastest yacht on race day, with a team of Olympic-level athletes ready to sail it and make it fly thanks to cutting-edge hydrofoils. We will address these challenges with the current defenders of the Cup: Emirates Team New Zealand. We will discuss the important lessons learnt in optimizing human-machine workflows and some of the skills, mindset, and cultural shifts required to successfully embed AI technology into a fast-moving, performance-driven organization.

How to tame your (AI) dragon | Liz Grennan and Rachel Dooley

Building off of McKinsey’s own internal AI deployments, this session will explain why lawyers are now on the front lines of AI, how McKinsey learned to think differently about AI risk, and how governments, businesses and citizens around the world can manage the dangers of AI.

Impact-driven inclusion: Creating value via access | Nicole Chavez, Lois Schonberger, Mehdi Bilgrami, and Sara Cinnamon

Marginalized groups were once considered outlier users; often neglected during ideation and denied access to the full range of functionality within an experience. In an industry on the precipice of change, we’ve found that disabilities are in fact a mismatch between a user’s needs and their environment, not “edge cases” to be neglected. We learned that in the face of inequality, products could never be justice driven. Luckily, we creative thinkers consider these issues solvable. By expanding our design methodologies, we open the aperture to who our users are and how we might better serve them.

Activating the new possible of work | Stefan Moritz

We are currently living lives we never could have imagined, and employers and employees face several questions regarding the future of work. This keynote will focus on Covid learnings, accelerated trends and human aspirations to explore, how the future of organizations, workplaces and collaboration might look like. We will highlight the stacked benefits and challenges of getting this right. We will present our research of employer and employee future expectations and how these views differ between industries and organizations. We will share learnings from inspirational examples on hybrid working and offer a perspective on how organizations can proactively shape the new possible of work to stay ahead.

AI can help the world — but we need to work together | Ashley Van Heteren

As long as humans have built machines, we’ve feared that one day they will destroy us. Actually, the opposite may be true. People are already using AI to help tackle big social issues, from overcoming racial bias in hiring to catching wildlife poachers, and identifying victims of online sexual exploitation. However, the real impact of this work is currently limited by barriers to scaling, including data accessibility and a lack of diverse AI talent.

The solution? Collaboration. In this session, the leaders who’ve built these initiatives will tell us why tech companies, NGOs and governments need to come together to scale these ideas. So they can go from help tens of thousands of people, to tens of millions.

Building a more inclusive US economy | Kweilin Ellingrud and André Dua

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified areas of inequality and inequity across society — in terms of both lives and livelihoods. History shows us that those who are the hardest hit during a crisis have the least ability to bounce back and take the longest. Unemployment and underemployment, barriers to educational attainment, and workplace trends like automation add even more pressure on the most vulnerable segments of our population. This session will explore these challenges and lay out the type of collaboration between the public, private, and social sectors that can help build a more resilient, inclusive, post-pandemic economy.

2020: A pivotal moment for women in the workplace | Jess Huang

The events of 2020 completely turned corporate America upside down — from a global pandemic to social unrest, the workforce is experiencing unprecedented disruption. The impact from these events is alarming: McKinsey & Company and Lean In’s annual Women in the Workplace report found 1 in 4 women are considering downshifting their careers or stepping out entirely. Corporate America is at a crossroads that could undo years of progress. If masses of women leave, it will have lasting negative effects for decades. However, if companies make significant investments and build a more flexible and empathetic workplace, they could not only maintain but advance gender diversity in the long term. This session will explore how we achieve this goal and best practices for advancing women in the workplace.