Corporate Executive Board

We drive faster, more effective decision making for more than 120,000 business professionals worldwide. Leading corporations and not-for-profit organizations look to us for performance-sharpening guidance across all major disciplines and areas of business.

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With Great Sadness

It is with great sadness that CEB has lost a dear member of our family. Brian Powilatis, a dedicated and charismatic leader, mentor, and friend at our firm for more than seven years, has passed away.

In the midst of unprecedented financial times, the exchange of trusted and timely guidance matters more than ever before. Members of the Corporate Executive Board belong to the most powerful executive network in the world, a network that allows us to provide you with visibility into the best, proven ideas that have been formed by real practitioners, and tested by their experience.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve tapped into that collective experience and reviewed thousands of 2009 operating plans from a cross-section of executive teams. In testing their thinking against our strategic research archives and on objective micro-economic lens, we looked for instances where common assumptions and conventional wisdom might lead them to make poor decisions:

We sought out blind spots on company radar screens that undermine their performance. We have found five imperatives we believe every company must consider when reviewing and revising their 2009 plans and a set of “to do’s” for each imperative which have proven time and again to distinguish the winners from the losers. Over 10,000 executives from 3,000 companies signed up to attend our teleconference on December 3 to explore these imperatives.

Improve Cost Discipline

Reduce Cost of Goods Sold and Capital Use, not General & Administrative Spending

Focus on Cost of Goods Sold rather than General & Administrative expenses to achieve long-term cost discipline.
Incorporate capital costs into SKU reduction efforts.

Protect Growth Initiatives

Elevate, consolidate, and protect innovation funding

Name and protect explicit growth bets in the capital budget.
Incorporate concrete innovation targets into performance expectations and reporting, even amidst belt-tightening.

Leverage Financial Strengths

Reenvision your value chain as a capital and pricing chain

Foster innovations that target the shifting financial strength of customers and suppliers.
Use the crisis to price for the true value of intangibles that customers under-appreciate.

Exploit Risk Opportunities

Embrace, don’t eradicate, the right risk exposures

Harmonize executive risk tolerances and pursue those you are uniquely positioned to manage.
Evaluate your contract portfolios with an eye toward renegotiating past (and changing future) contract terms.

Make Critical Talent Plays

Use today’s crisis to court & cultivate tomorrow’s winners

Seize the opportunity to close critical skill gaps with “not-in-play” talent.
Reward relative outperformance (even if you must court the wrath of executive-pay watchdogs).

Click below to access the insights, tools and teleconference replays that will help you and your teams win in 2009.

Avoiding Traps on the Way to a Quick Win

In pursuing quick wins, new leaders often fall into these 5 traps that undermine success.

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Executive Guidance for 2009

Information and resources to make the wisest possible decisions as you review and revise FY 09 plans

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Responding to the
Credit Market Crisis

Six ways the current capital market crisis should change the drivers of your short and medium term operating plans

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CEO, Tom Monahan Interviewed
on CNBC's Squawk on the Street

Our Chairman and CEO, Tom Monahan, was featured on CNBC's Squawk on the Street to discuss what the best businesses must do differently in 2009 to thrive and survive.

Executive Guidance 2009
Would you like to order
more copies?
Obtain a copy/copies for your team. Please email our Member Services department here .

Hear how each corporate functional area is responding to the Financial Crisis.