When McDonald’s golden arches first arrived in China more than three decades ago, they soon became a ubiquitous symbol of modern urban life. By the 2010s, China had become McDonald’s second-largest market in terms of restaurant count and also one of the most competitive consumer arenas on earth. Yet scale brought new challenges. The China leadership team sat at what we call “CEO minus three”—a few layers removed from the decision-makers in Oak Brook, Illinois. Organizational distance isn’t just geographic—it often shapes how quickly, and whether, China leaders can act.

Competing at “China speed” can be structurally tough for multinational corporations. Typically, China CEOs have latitude over local matters, particularly on marketing and sales, but the biggest decisions still climb from China to Asia-Pacific to global headquarters. The multinational governance ladder is world-class at control and consistency but not necessarily built to match hungry and agile local competitors. In quick-service restaurants, for example, while China teams of multinationals might be polishing PowerPoints for distribution and approvals, local rivals can open new stores rapidly and roll out innovative products at a frenetic pace without navigating decision chains of command: Pineapple and pork rib burgers! Cheesy potato ball afternoon snacks! Sandwich-and-milk-tea sets!

The contrast highlights a broader challenge: How can even the most nimble multinationals compete with founder-led Chinese rivals in a market where quick service means not only KFC and Burger King but homegrown chains Tastien and Wallace, small-format look-alikes, and thousands of casual independents?

Multinationals have long succeeded in China, but relentless competition from local rivals has exposed the structural limits that keep many from matching the market’s pace. Chinese firms benefit from ownership-style incentives, real decision autonomy, and a culture built for speed and local experimentation—while multinational governance, incentives, and culture are increasingly misaligned with this environment. The heart of the question: How do corporate executives compete against entrepreneurs?

Consider the journey of McDonald’s in China. A Big Mac felt expensive when McDonald’s first opened in Beijing in 1992. It wasn’t a luxury item, but it was definitely a premium foreign import: 6.4 RMB ($0.9) for a hamburger was more than half a day’s wage for the average Chinese worker. A Big Mac purchased in the US costs three times as much in absolute terms, but the average worker could pay for it with less than fifteen minutes’ worth of work.

A Big Mac in China today, at a cost of roughly 28 RMB (about $4.07), eats up only a fraction of the average monthly wage—making it broadly affordable and a mid-market product. That flip didn’t happen because McDonald’s got cheaper—it happened because the average Chinese got richer. Chinese wages have surged more than forty-fold since 1992.

It didn’t take long before McDonald’s became a sensation with young urban families eager for new lifestyle and consumption experiences. Western brands weren’t merely offering alternatives; they were often introducing entirely new categories. There was no life insurance before AIG, no hyper-markets before Walmart and Carrefour, no personal care industry before Unilever and P&G, and no coffee industry before Starbucks. Of course, there was no quick-service restaurant industry before KFC and McDonald’s.

By 2015, McDonald’s had more than 2,200 restaurants in mainland China (the US had 14,259). But as consumers matured, competition intensified; rivals flooded the market with bubble tea, fried chicken, and new quick-service formats. While US headquarters was rolling out drive-throughs, China’s food-and-beverage space had moved onto app-based delivery, and consumers expected burgers at their doors in minutes. Though China remained one of the company’s fastest-growing international markets; sustaining momentum required significant investment. Yet corporate headquarters—balancing global priorities—didn’t always see China as a top priority, even as access to capital was critical locally. For many global quick-service chains, China had become a paradox: a hyper-competitive, low-priced brawl where new stores didn’t offer returns superior to other markets.

Against this backdrop, a strategic opportunity emerged in 2017 for McDonald’s to strengthen its operating model. The company sold 80 percent of its mainland China and Hong Kong operations to a consortium including state-backed CITIC; its private equity arm CITIC Capital (now called Trustar Capital), and US private equity firm the Carlyle Group. “The structure was deliberately designed to unlock the next phase of growth,” says Alwin Poon, a former managing director at the Carlyle Group who was in charge of the deal. “CITIC brought local knowledge and government connections, while Carlyle contributed financial discipline, corporate best practices, and the ability to help bridge cultural gaps among the parties.”

Governance shifted materially: profit-and-loss (P&L) ownership and capital allocation moved to a China-based board, and the leadership team adopted private equity incentives tied to growth and profitability. “We instilled an owner mentality into management and empowered them to re-evaluate all aspects of the business to more effectively compete—from menu innovation to supply chain localization,” Alwin tells us.

Phyllis Cheung, CEO of McDonald’s China, and her team began building China-first systems, such as a proprietary digital backbone for two hundred thousand employees, supplier co-design to develop new chicken products that excite customers, and idea-to-launch cycles as short as three months. The ownership change further enabled faster investment decisions and shortened innovation cycles, aligning the organization more closely with the pace of local competitors.

McDonald’s China entered a phase of rapid expansion, opening 1,000 stores per year since 2023 to arrive at around 7,700 stores today, and is targeting 10,000 by 2028. “Now we report to a board that sits in China. It’s essentially one layer, and critical decisions can be executed faster than before,” Phyllis says.

Success and confidence in China’s upside set up the next phase. In 2023, McDonald’s agreed to buy out Carlyle’s minority stake while Trustar Capital retained 52 percent; the move reinforced the strategic value of the partnership model with a local Chinese institution.

This being China, the battles never stop. A snacking price war that erupted online has driven the price of milk tea down to 1 RMB ($0.1), wiping the advantage of premium locations. And in mid-2025, delivery battles between Alibaba and Meituan pushed prices even lower. It’s always a tough battle out there, but with greater local autonomy, multinational leadership can decide more deliberately when and how to engage.

This chapter is aimed primarily at multinationals, and the lesson is straightforward. In China, you have to find ways to unleash corporate entrepreneurship and sustain it despite governance challenges. In practice, that means treating the China unit as a full-fledged business, not a sales outpost. McDonald’s illustrates that when ownership sits in China, autonomy becomes real, “China speed” becomes instinctive, and entrepreneurial energy moves to the front line.

“Localization is the key to success,” Phyllis tells us. “Being truly customer-centric to adapt to fast-changing Chinese consumer needs can be achieved if headquarters is willing to delegate authority while maintaining good governance structures.” What every global company should recognize is that China is filled with founders and competitors backed by local capital, driven by a cultural instinct to fight every day, and operating with little to lose. Not every fast-moving, hungry Chinese competitor succeeds—in fact, most don’t—and among the downsides of extreme speed can be wasteful expenditures and spectacular failures. Yet from an incumbent multinational’s perspective, when corporate processes meet a freewheeling entrepreneur, hunger usually has the advantage. “Competing in China is very different from competing in Japan, Southeast Asia, in France and Germany, where you can reliably forecast six or twelve months out,” says Hai Ye, a McKinsey senior partner leading the growth, marketing, and sales practice. “To manage China, you need a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, and you must break down silos so that decisions move quickly—something difficult for global headquarters that want to stay in control.”

Every company will shape the solution differently, but the principles remain constant. To optimize your China business to best compete, leaders should examine the following elements:

How can you grant the China team the authority and autonomy they need to make quick decisions?

In the weeks after COVID first hit, a curious thing happened inside one of China’s quiet industrial champions. Demand for mask-making equipment soared—and operating them required programmable industrial controllers. As supply chains tightened, factories rushed to expand capacity; many plant managers, fearing shortages, were hoarding controllers in their apartments.

Most automation suppliers saw the opportunity—few could act on it. Entering a new sector meant diverting production and R&D from existing lines, a short-term profit hit many multinationals struggled to absorb. Their organizations were segmented by region and industry; moving into mask making first required deciding who “owned” the business, a bureaucratic process that could take months. Reassigning engineers also put managers’ performance metrics at risk. While teams debated responsibility, the window closed.

Inovance—a rising Chinese industrial automation company with more than thirty thousand employees—had never operated in public-health equipment. But chairman and co-founder Xingming Zhu made a different call. Watching mask demand explode from Shenzhen, he made mask making a company priority the same day a sales director flagged the opportunity. Speed, he knew, would decide the outcome.

Engineers were shifted from long-cycle industrial projects. Together with customers, Inovance studied imported Japanese machines, which went quickly out of stock, and helped customers replicate them at scale—but with Inovance controllers. Engineers realized that mask-making machines didn’t require micron-level precision; tolerances of a few millimeters were acceptable. Customers needed speed, not perfection. Teams reviewed drawings, made substitutions, tested configurations on the fly, and fixed issues directly on the factory floor.

The most decisive advantage lay in Inovance’s supply chain. Years before COVID, Inovance had pushed aggressively into servo products—feedback-controlled motion components—and stockpiled significant volumes of chipsets. When the semiconductor shortage hit, Inovance had inventory; its competitors did not. And while multinational rivals often needed a year to qualify a new supplier for any parts, Inovance could do so in two to three months, in part by using other large manufacturers’ approved supplier lists, accepting calculated risk to be able to move faster. Within weeks, Inovance’s systems were shipping nationwide. Above all, leadership made the difference.

Other Chinese firms moved just as decisively. The EV maker BYD assigned three thousand engineers to build mask-making equipment as COVID began to spread. Masks rolled off the line within seven days; eventually BYD was producing five million a day plus three hundred thousand bottles of disinfectant.

Mask making was short lived, but this story illustrates how Chinese companies move when the market shifts—fast, even instantly. Western and Japanese incumbents had the technology to capture this market, but pushing a new initiative through headquarters on another continent took too long. Approvals would come after the moment had passed.

Structural autonomy isn’t cosmetic. It means giving China leaders real control over funding, staffing, marketing, and R&D—the full stack of decisions—and requires headquarters to become comfortable shifting control. This is where the tension lies: trust, compliance, and risk. Headquarters worries that full autonomy may lead to brand dilution, regulatory missteps, or misalignment with global priorities. Yet without autonomy, local teams can’t move fast enough to compete. “That’s where corporate governance comes in,” says Dai Feng, founder of CareCapital Group. “If multinationals build truly indigenous organizations with localized products and services, and still maintain control, they can perform as well as Chinese companies.”

McDonald’s sold a majority stake to a local investor to grant greater autonomy to its China operations; but not every multinational will—or should—take that path. The real challenge is designing mechanisms that simulate ownership without changing shareholding structure. How do you rethink culture, re-design incentives, and create an environment where China executives think like owners, not employees?

Giving China leaders real “skin in the game”—for example, letting them invest in the China entity with private equity–style upside—could shift behavior quickly. But true upside requires real authority. That’s the dilemma: how to give owner-level incentives while still maintaining essential reporting lines and governance. “I know some multinational CEOs operating in China with plenty of entrepreneurial spirit. These leaders are global CEO ‘minus-one’ who are able to directly influence and deploy real authority around investment resource allocation,” says Phyllis of McDonald’s.

At McKinsey we debate this issue for our China practice. We run China locally but operate within a global firm with strict risk controls, quality standards, and a shared reputation. We’re also a partnership—our leaders have partnership shares and long-standing relationships—which helps build trust. Even so, the trade-off between local autonomy and global control is a constant balancing act, and most multinationals lack this structural advantage when it comes to China. When China leaders are hired externally or global CEOs have limited China exposure, trust isn’t a given. It must be built.

Trust also comes from familiarity. Many European company board members fly into Shanghai for a day and fly out the next, says Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, CEO of Jebsen Group, which has been operating in China for over a century. “They don’t visit Wuxi, Wuhan, or Chongqing—and without seeing 95 percent of China, it’s hard for them to really understand the country.”

By contrast, China-savvy leaders such as Hank Greenberg, AIG’s former CEO, and Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone’s founder, are legendary for their frequent visits and deep ties to China. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s trips are always given top-level attention from officials and media alike. A smaller group of committed executives also serve on the International Business Leaders’ Advisory Councils for the mayors of Shanghai and Beijing, maintaining direct lines into local decision-making.

Another approach is to strengthen China expertise at the board level. This can mean appointing Chinese directors or expatriates with long operating experience in China. Gordon Orr, McKinsey’s former China chairman, for example, now sits on the board of European private equity firm EQT.

It’s not feasible for most CEOs to be often on the ground, but, as Alfons notes, “Your No. 2 probably should be there, with the resources to truly understand the market. And bring Chinese talent into global headquarters so the Chinese consumer stays close to the center of gravity.”

How do you move fast amid uncertainty — without falling into “analysis paralysis”?

If autonomy is the foundation for survival in China, speed is the weapon. China’s business environment runs on a mix of ambition, improvisation, and ruthless competition that forces companies to move faster than anywhere else—that’s “China speed.” Survival depends less on being perfect than on being first.

Take instant noodles. Japanese and Taiwanese brands introduced the category to China in the 1980s and 1990s and dominated for decades, becoming household names. By the 2010s, the market was stagnating as consumers turned away from “fried junk food,” and local players such as Master Kong, Uni-president, and Jinmailang were moving into the lead. Baixiang, a regional brand from top wheat-producing Henan province, was closely trailing but still concentrated in smaller inland cities.

Baixiang chose speed as its strategy, rapidly adopting advanced technology to outpace rivals. In 2018, Chairman Yao Zhongliang crushed a rival’s pack of instant noodles in the workshop before his engineers and told them, “What we lack isn’t capacity—it’s a reason to make young people proud.” The company pivoted its R&D toward healthier, non-fried noodles and began experimenting with freeze-drying technology.

Its speed was tested in 2021 when catastrophic floods hit ninety-eight-million-strong Henan province. Within three hours of the first SOS call, trucks rolled out of Baixiang’s warehouses, delivering noodles to a children’s welfare home in Zhengzhou. In the following days, the company donated thirty thousand boxes of food and 5 million RMB (about $0.7 million) to the relief effort. A viral livestream showed one worker using sign language while packing boxes—“Ship slowly, because we package with care.”

Baixiang didn’t let the goodwill fade. While competitors were negotiating supermarket displays, Baixiang pushed into new channels, placing hot-and-sour noodles in thousands of milk-tea shops and snack cafés frequented by Gen Z consumers. This was start-up speed for a thirty-year-old company, creating new demand in a category many thought was stagnating.

In 2023, Baixiang’s instincts struck again. On Douyin— the original ByteDance video app known globally as TikTok—the hashtag #cilantro surged past 10.5 billion views. Within three months, Baixiang’s engineers launched “Super-Fragrant Cilantro Noodles.” Co-created with Douyin’s Super Brand Day and promoted through influencers, the product sold out in twenty-four hours and became one of the platform’s most shared foods that year.

By 2025, Baixiang had evolved from a regional underdog to a symbol of national pride. Its premium Tang Hao He line—featuring six-hour slow-simmer bone broth and freeze-dried toppings— recorded 3 billion RMB (about $430 million) in annual sales with an ROIC seven times the industry average. At a Forbidden City press conference, Chairman Yao lifted a bowl: “Some said domestic products are low end. Now, in this bowl, there’s the confidence of six hundred years of imperial kitchens.”

Speed, for Baixiang, isn’t just about moving quickly. It’s about sensing shifts early, mobilizing instantly, and turning every burst of momentum—from a viral clip to a national crisis—into competitive advantage.

Many Chinese companies are wired for speed because decision-making hierarchy is flat, engineers talk directly to clients, and managers are rewarded for growth, not caution. “Many local companies rigorously require their sales teams to have at least a product management background, often having an engineering or technical background, which cuts out a decision-making layer,” says Jan Milark, a McKinsey associate partner who works with industrial clients.

And as Nick notes, the secret isn’t perfect aim—it’s firing often—the business equivalent of taking more shots on goal. The more you fire, the more likely one will hit. In practice, that means shipping version 1.0, seeing what breaks, fixing it, and launching versions 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 in quick succession. It’s a culture built on iteration.

The electric vehicle industry, for instance, is defined by speed. Market leaders have learned to move quickly in a hyper-competitive environment. BYD uses an extreme 24/7 R&D model—engineering shifts covering all hours on seven days of a week. This helped compress development and mass production of its Blade Battery into eighteen months, while EV development cycles were whittled from five years down to two. Toyota engineers working on its joint venture sedan bZ3 were stunned by BYD’s practice of revising designs late in the process—almost unthinkable for traditional automakers, which are accustomed to locking prototypes much earlier.

“You need to be set up for speed in this environment; you can’t expect three committees to approve headcounts, to lock every investment in advance, or to have an absolutely perfect platform,” says Jan. A former colleague visiting a Shanghai robotics firm found executives in their twenties and thirties who’d just decided—at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday—to triple production. When asked about their annual plan, they were puzzled. “Annual plan? We can do it, so we did it.”

Let’s be clear: “China speed” has its downsides and trade-offs. Some companies move too fast—slashing prices, cutting corners, or releasing products that aren’t ready. These aren’t learning cycles; they erode trust. Multinationals can wield a contrasting advantage, displaying strong quality, safety, and risk controls that can allow premium pricing; the goal isn’t to discard those systems—but to prevent them from becoming bottlenecks.

That’s the harder question: How to preserve quality while increasing firing frequency? Speed doesn’t mean recklessness. It means building a China business that learns faster, empowering engineers to engage customers directly, shortening feedback loops, measuring progress by iteration instead of annual plans, and acting even without perfect data. The ambition isn’t for multinationals to mimic the excess—it’s to selectively import the speed.

How do you develop the conviction to localize—despite the cost and the divergence from global standards?

Rooted in the Latin locus , meaning “place,” the word localization literally means “making something belong.” For Straumann Group, this wasn’t a slogan—it was their China business model.

A dental implant pioneer founded after World War II as a family-owned materials science lab in Basel, Switzerland, Straumann entered China about twenty years ago. Crucially, it didn’t try to “export Switzerland” but instead plugged into China’s local ecosystem. Straumann built relationships with clinicians and distributors, invested in local R&D and manufacturing, and adapted its portfolio and economics to Chinese conditions.

Dentistry varies widely from country to country—insurance, certification, costs of schooling, and rules about which clinicians can perform what procedures all differ—and dental technology companies are more accustomed than most medical technology firms to adjusting their management models accordingly. That flexibility helped European and Korean family-origin multinationals thrive in China.

Straumann entered China in the early 2000s through a local dealer. A strong dealer can help navigate hundreds of decisions: where to expand, how to price, which dentists to target, what training to offer, and more. Only after Straumann gained real familiarity with China through these accumulated decisions did the company begin acquiring select dealers, integrating them, and turning them into the operational backbone of its China business. That humility—local first, global second—became a cornerstone of Straumann’s success in one of the few healthcare categories where a multinational still dominates.

Then came volume-based procurement (VBP), a government initiative targeted at reducing drug prices and increasing accessibility. For most multinationals, this means lower margins and a big damper on their China business. Straumann instead saw opportunity. It engineered a lower-cost implant line and opened a Shanghai manufacturing site in 2025 to train local dentists and meet rising demand. The result: an expanded portfolio, solid margins from a new customer base, and implants affordable for millions more patients.

Today, China is a major business for Straumann. Shanghai is part of its global manufacturing footprint and an R&D base for key product lines. China accounts for more than 15 percent of global sales and is the company’s biggest driver in the Asia-Pacific region, which is already 24 percent of revenue.

Everyone knows localization matters, but a full “in China, for China” model requires commitment and capital—and often requires stepping away from global frameworks. The real question in the next China is how far you’re willing to go and what you’re willing to trade-off. For years, multinationals succeeded with partial localization because global technology and standards were true differentiators. That advantage is eroding. Chinese competitors now engineer and manufacture at global quality—and in some categories define the benchmark—while moving faster and at lower cost. Volkswagen is the latest example of an “in China, for China” strategy; by shifting R&D, design, and production to its Hefei hub, the company says it can cut EV development costs by half and cycles by 30 percent.

We also find “de-costing” to be a critical factor. Chinese customers are unwilling to pay for marginal features they don’t need, pushing companies to “de-engineer” cost out of the product or tailor quality or performance to match what the market wants. Clinging to global architectures risks “under-localizing” and being priced out.

Localization also means adopting a China cost base. Input costs, from supply chains and utilities to labor, land, and capital, are far lower than in most Western markets, forcing hard trade-offs. One client struggled over whether to re-design its China organization and salary structures to match local competitors, which would create tension when it came to global standards and operating models. Another quick-service restaurant client debated local store fit-out standards; adopting Chinese local structures would halve the cost but dilute global methodology and branding. All these are real decisions that come with non-trivial trade-offs.

Moreover, deep localization comes at a cost. It requires new domestic capabilities, fresh investments, and a different governance model. More fundamentally, it requires acknowledging that legacy global standards and technologies are no longer decisive—or, in some cases, have become the burden. It’s a hard pill to swallow, and it sits at the heart of the strategic tension many multinationals now face.

“Localize more” is easy to say; placing capital to stay relevant in China’s next cycle is much harder.

How do you build a culture that rewards a can-do mindset, smart risk-taking, and strong ownership?

French economist Jean-Baptiste Say defined entrepreneurs as people who move resources from lower to higher productivity. Europe built its version through mercantile trade and craft; America’s grew from a frontier belief that anyone could make something from nothing. From industrialist Henry Ford’s “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right,” to Jeff Bezos’s “it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity… thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” US business culture has celebrated boldness and possibility. Silicon Valley turned that spirit into a system powered by venture capital and speed.

China has now entered that arena. In just over three decades, the country has layered one of the world’s most dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems on top of a substantial state-owned foundation, resulting in a system where market-driven competition and state influence coexist—sometimes uneasily and often differently across sectors. Much of this intensity is often described through the idea of “wolf spirit,” a business metaphor that Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei helped popularize, capturing perseverance, acute sensitivity to opportunity, a relentless drive to survive, and a collective dimension. Wolves hunt in packs, after all.

Many clients ask, “Does my company have enough wolf spirit?” We tend to prefer “animal spirit,” borrowed from economist John Maynard Keynes, who defined it as the “spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.” Whether you channel wolves, horses, or Keynesian economics, the point is the same: in China, incentives drive ownership, and autonomy fuels speed, but culture unlocks the final gear. Thriving in an ultra-competitive environment requires more than strategy or structure: it means building organizations that enable hustle, tolerate small failures, and empower even junior team members to make real decisions.

Take WeBank, China’s first digital-only bank. Founded in 2014, it faced a paradox: How could a sector known for hierarchy and risk aversion cultivate entrepreneurship? Chairman and CEO David Ku’s answer was to push decisions to the front line. “The person closest to the problem should have the power to solve it,” David says. When a junior employee, fresh out of university, spotted two clunky steps in the lending journey, he quietly reversed their order, tested the change, and delivered a fix that produced a nine-fold jump in click-through rate overnight.

David reflects, “As CEO, I might make this business nine times better in ten years. But there’s no way I can make something better in twenty-four hours. That’s the power of letting the little guy make the call.” David tells us he spends hours each week thinking about how to create the right culture, allowing the people who know the customer shape the experience, enabling model-builders the space to make mistakes, and ensuring innovative ideas reach decision-makers—all while containing risks so errors don’t “dig a hole and bury you.”

That philosophy extends to WeBank’s deployment of AI; while major strategic initiatives are driven top-down, David promotes a “horse-racing,” bottom-up approach that encourages many teams to race and test similar ideas, around, say, AI-generated advertising content. The winning formula will be adopted. “If you ask smart young people, they’ll always come up with something impactful,” he says.

This mindset is rare in banking but critical for a new digital institution. “Our internal culture and how we encourage staff matter as much as the business model,” David explains. By 2024, WeBank had served nearly four hundred million customers, making it China’s largest digital bank.

The lesson applies irrespective of the industry. China’s market economy is only forty years old; many industries are still led by first-generation entrepreneurs in their prime, and the competitive landscape reflects their energy and urgency. As one apparel executive puts it: “It’s not about size—it’s about agility. If you’re not nimble, you’re already behind.”

But the spirit we’re describing isn’t uniquely Chinese—it appears in markets where the entrepreneurial environment is intense. This isn’t a Chinese versus multinational story; it’s everyone versus everyone. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are losing share to hungrier private firms. More established companies are getting challenged by nimbler start-ups. As Andreas Tschiesner, a Munich-based McKinsey senior partner, notes, “In EVs, the West has the same capabilities and similar talented engineers; they’re simply lacking the culture. At 11 p.m. in China’s R&D centers, the lights are still on. People would rather build something that could change the future than sit in a hotel room watching TV.”

Of course, wolf culture has a dark side. In Chinese business circles, “wolf” is a controversial term. It can mean hungry and relentless—but also reckless, corner cutting, and willing to bend rules. We’ve seen the consequences: substandard buildings, manipulated financials, regulatory blowups. These aren’t entrepreneurial bets: they cause real damage to society.

And the lifestyle itself can be punishing. Does anyone enjoy being a wolf? Many leaders prefer the professionalism and humanity of more structured environments—one reason our colleagues choose McKinsey. At the same time, some Chinese entrepreneurs thrive on the intensity, especially when financial rewards are substantial. But what feels exhilarating in one’s twenties and thirties can become exhausting over time—and for a younger generation raised in greater comfort, the appeal is fading even faster.

We’d like to impart a lesson about conviction. For multinationals, China is one market among many; that optionality is both a strength and a weakness. When every incremental dollar could go anywhere, the China business must compete for attention. “They can hedge China,” says Leon Meng, founder of Ascendant Capital Partners. “Local companies can’t. China is their only game—and that single-market conviction fuels speed, resilience, and a higher tolerance for risk.”

The mindset gap creates an uneven fight. The entrepreneur wakes up with no exit or fallback plan. For a corporate CEO—who may rotate out in a few years—conviction on China is conditional, shaped as much by career risk as by market belief, and can sometimes be fleeting. The China CEO sits in the middle, constantly reading headquarters’ mood, gauging how far they can push, and sometimes hedging for their own next role.

Conviction, in the end, isn’t declared. It’s engineered. McDonald’s China didn’t succeed by pushing harder; it re-designed itself to unlock corporate entrepreneurship—shifting ownership, collapsing decision layers, empowering local innovation, and rebuilding supply chains for speed—while adhering to the discipline of a global firm. As Phyllis tells us, “It’s not sustainable that home delivery should cost less than eating in the restaurant—but while food delivery wars are ongoing, we need autonomy and speed in deciding when to dance with the wolves, so to speak, in business terms.”

McDonald’s is a clear example, but it’s part of a broader pattern. At BASF, China-based leadership teams control major investment and R&D decisions at local Verbund sites—highly integrated production complexes—treating the China business as a full operating platform rather than a downstream market. At Nike and adidas, local product, digital, and supply chain teams are empowered to design for Chinese consumers and run faster test-and-learn cycles. Schneider Electric has given China management teams P&L ownership and engineering authority, enabling them to re-design products and cost structures to compete head-to-head with domestic players while operating within global governance.

Phyllis created a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation inside one of the world’s most recognized brands. You don’t necessarily need to be a wolf in China—but you need a system built to dance with them.