This is a profile image of Vidhya Ganesan

Vidhya Ganesan

Partner and Managing PartnerKuala Lumpur

Leads our office in Malaysia and helps organizations leverage the power of technology and digital transformation to foster better products, services, and experiences.

Vidhya is the managing partner of McKinsey’s Malaysia office. She has supported regional clients across sectors, including the public sector, telecommunications, and manufacturing, with large scale transformations driven by digital, analytics, and technology. She was most recently based in Sri Lanka where she helped build and co-lead McKinsey’s Sri Lanka office.

For many years, Vidhya led McKinsey’s work on digital government and the digital economy in Asia. In this capacity, she helped government agencies employ digital technology to deliver new services and improve existing ones, while operating more efficiently and with greater transparency. She has guided large-scale transformation programs spanning the social, economic, and financial sectors. In low-and-middle-income nations, these transformations include leveraging technology for the improvement of education and healthcare.

In addition to her public-sector work, Vidhya also advises high-tech and telecommunications companies as well as contract manufacturers. In these sectors, she guides organizations on tech-enabled transformations, external spend/procurement-driven cost transformations, manufacturing productivity improvement programs and more.

Examples of her recent client work include the following:

  • Supporting apparel manufacturers with external spend/next-gen procurement driven cost transformations (non head count related costs) to double their operating profit, while ensuring an uplift in the livelihoods and capabilities of their frontline workforce
  • Supporting an apparel manufacturer with tech enabled transformation on their journey to become a World Economic Forum lighthouse in apparel manufacturing
  • Managing several digital strategy and implementation projects for a large regional telecommunications company, including setting the overall strategy for building a digital business unit from scratch
  • Charting the contributions that a multinational technology company could make to the “smart city” agenda, helping to create a self-assessment survey for their clients to determine how well they are embracing digitally disruptive technologies
  • Supporting several Asian governments to develop their digital-economy blueprint
  • Helping a Scandinavian government evaluate their digital maturity and develop a national digital government and digitalization agenda
  • Assisting the government of an Asian country with the design and development of a transformation program that focuses on national priorities, addressing issues such as crime and corruption and transforming the state of education

Vidhya has led a masterclass on the future of digital government at several meetings of the Global Government Summit, an annual event for senior government leaders and ministers from around the world. She has also served as a fellow with the McKinsey Center for Government, a global hub for research, collaboration, and innovation in government performance. Vidhya publishes frequently on the digital opportunities for improving government as well as on women in the workplace. She also led our work with World Economic Forum on creating gender parity lighthouses and is a leader of our All In, Diversity and Inclusion programs across Asia.

Published Work

Redesigning apparel manufacturing in Asia: A pattern for resilience,” McKinsey & Company, May 2023

How Singapore is harnessing design to transform government services,” McKinsey & Company, October 2019

How data-rich ASEAN can leverage this resource,” The Business Times, December 2016

Unlocking Sri Lanka’s digital opportunity, McKinsey & Company, October 2018

“Gender diversity on Singapore’s corporate boards,” Business Times, June 28, 2018

Secure, Open Digital Systems To Tackle Cash Shortage,” PGurus.com, December 2016

Using Data to Create Better Government,” Ethos, December 2016

e-Wallets to tackle cash shortage Post-Demonetization,” PGurus.com, November 2016

Transforming government through digitization,” McKinsey & Company, November 2016

Past experience

Morningstar
Management associate

Credit Suisse
OTC derivatives analyst

Education

Oxford University
MFE, financial economics

National University of Singapore
BEng, electrical engineering