Productivity gains at a national level can be driven by a surprisingly small number of companies. A new McKinsey Global Institute report called The Power of One finds that a mere 2% of companies drove around 65% of their national sample’s positive productivity growth through their bold strategies. In fact, a dozen more companies like Apple in the U.S. could have doubled U.S. productivity growth, the study asserts. Productivity is measured as the gross value added per employee, and when that value grows, so do profits for companies as well as wages for employees themselves.
More than half the companies in the study managed to contribute positively to national productivity growth. But while only a few “standouts” drove most of the gains, it was likewise only a few “stragglers” that were to blame for most of the drags on national productivity. The U.S. had three times as many standouts as stragglers, while Germany and the U.K. had almost even numbers, which helped the U.S. pull ahead of the European nations in terms of productivity growth. The U.S.’s flexible labor markets also seem to play a significant role because workers can move quickly from poorly performing companies to productive powerhouses.
The research, which homes in on four sectors, tracks standout firms—like Apple, Amazon, Costco, Delta, and The Home Depot in the U.S. and Tesco and easyJet in the U.K. and REWE in Germany—as they drive growth via their strategic moves, innovative business models, and added value for consumers, which prompts competitors in their industries to respond. An action-and-response dynamic then generates potent bursts of productivity that boosts national prosperity in a meaningful way. Instead of many firms moving an inch, a few jump ahead by a mile, and that makes all the difference.
An Experiment with Significant Economic Implications
As we struggle with an uncertain economic outlook, an aging population, and a tight labor market, productivity matters more than ever in the United States. U.S. productivity recently fell in Q1 2025 for the first time since 2022. Knowing what drives it—and what strategies can increase it—is at the heart of this research.
In this research, my colleagues created a “lab economy” with about 8,300 real-life, large firms operating in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Their sample focused on the retail, automotive and aerospace, travel and logistics, as well as computer and electronics sectors. To track precisely where each country’s workers were creating the most value and contributing to overall productivity growth over time, they looked at the relatively stable period between 2011 and 2019—after the global financial crisis but before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted business. To make sure their findings were not unique to a particular time period, they also looked at available data from 2019 to 2023 and found similar patterns.
Analyzing the data revealed that fewer than 100 standout companies drove two-thirds of the productivity growth observed in the entire sample. Meanwhile, just 55 stragglers accounted for 50-65% of the firm-level productivity drag observed in the sample.
Where the United States Excels
Of the three countries and four sectors in scope, the United States’ productivity growth came out ahead of both Germany’s and the United Kingdom’s for a few reasons. First, the U.S. sample had relatively few stragglers that dragged down productivity levels. Second, the United States had freer movement of workers. In fact, crunching the numbers, about half of the productivity growth observed for the United States was due to the reallocation of labor from low- to high-productivity firms. That reallocation mattered, as just 5% of U.S. firms, which employed 23% of the sample’s workers, powered 78% of its productivity gains.
What Productivity Standouts Get Right
What distinguishes productivity standouts? They are not necessarily the most efficient companies, nor are they confined to tech giants or disruptive startups. They span sectors and vary in size and starting points, and each pursued one or more of the following bold strategies:
- Scaling cutting-edge business models like e-commerce or low-cost airline models
- Pivoting to high-growth markets, as Amazon did when it leapt into cloud computing
- Reimagining customer value, as The Home Depot did by improving its customer experience in-store and online
- Harnessing network and scale effects, as Apple did with its demand forecasts to optimize supply costs
- Transforming operations to boost labor efficiency and reduce costs
A final point here is that standouts don’t always stay that way: two-thirds of the standout cohort stood their ground in the 2019-2023 period, but one third of the standouts were new.
A Call to Action
For high productivity growth, leaders need to ensure that standout firms can thrive as they make significant contributions to the U.S. economy and our standard of living. Of course, policymakers will have to strike a balance between preventing excessive market concentration and catalyzing the continued success of leading firms.
Growth is further propelled by retraining workers in unproductive fields and upgrading infrastructure to support emerging sectors. Business leaders, for their part, would be wise to focus on bold strategies that create value.
If policy makers treat productivity as a strategic priority, they could better support high-performing companies to drive it at a national level. In today’s uncertain economy, many firms are shying away from bold moves. But the data shows that playing it safe won’t deliver real growth either for companies or for countries.