As a part of McKinsey’s global Operations and Organization Practices, Carey coleads the firm’s global work and helps companies implement zero-based productivity (ZBP).

Since joining McKinsey, Carey has driven broad-based efforts to set strategy, improve operating models, and achieve effective organizational design while advising global corporations across industries. He has guided leaders on financial planning, market entry, merger diligence, and postmerger management.

In recent years, Carey has focused on supporting organizational productivity, particularly through measuring and boosting sales-, general-, and administrative-expense efficiency. He applies the firm’s proprietary productivity-benchmarking tools and supports executives in rethinking their resource-allocation approach to manage costs better. A practitioner of the ZBP approach, he brings hands-on experience in leading ZBP transformations for Fortune 500 companies as well as variety of smaller companies. To extend this work beyond cost management, Carey also finds opportunities to apply ZBP to organizational design and productivity to help drive target-setting efforts for all corporate functions.

Examples of his recent client work include the following:

• directing a beverage company’s global ZBP-effort rollout that included resource-allocation work as the principal component of a multiyear productivity program
• leading a full-scale ZBP effort in the anchor North American market for an international food company, with results that included a global scale-up of the program after it achieved substantial savings
• guiding a global beverage manufacturer’s private-equity–style approach to setting granular cost benchmarks and targets that included addressing costs on a global basis
• leading cost-control and revenue-creation initiatives in multiple markets for consumer-facing companies across industries, including cable, chemicals, confectionary, and telecommunications

To raise awareness of the benefits of ZBP and other related approaches, Carey has contributed to several articles on cost management.