In their quest for innovation-led growth, executives are apt to approach technology investments with a conservative risk-averse mindset. This paper explains how taking an active approach to technology risk management, using three common portfolio management techniques, can reduce uncertainty and increase a company's opportunity for growth.

Why do organizations get blindsided by market transformations that could have been anticipated?  This article from Strategy & Leadership guides you through a systematic process for incorporating plausible but challenging future scenarios into your organization’s learning processes, to help mitigate risk and decrease the likelihood of being unprepared for discontinuities.

Increasing sensitivity to environmental issues among customers and channel partners, as well as a changing regulatory landscape, has caught many executives off guard. This report examines the myriad of topics surrounding Sustainability and shows CEOs how to execute a Sustainability strategy that can better the environment—and the bottom line.

Eastman Chemical Company turned to Monitor Group to help it drive organic growth in a highly competitive and commoditized B2B market for plastic packaging.

In this article from Marketing Management, Courtland Jenkins of Eastman Chemical and Monitor's Geoff Tuff, outline the challenges the company faced and how they worked to solve them: analyzing which customer segments valued Eastman's innovations, understanding the best means for communicating with those customers and demonstrating customer value.

“Paths to Prosperity; Promoting Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century,” a new Monitor Group study, interviewed entrepreneurs in 22 countries to determine attitudes and critical policies required for entrepreneurship to thrive in different regions around the world, including the importance of a society's fostering of entrepreneurial skills and tax policies that encourage R&D.

Monitor's research suggests that while the financial meltdown claimed a number of hedge funds, those funds with activist strategies are worth watching. This report, by Michael Armstrong and Jonathan Joffe from Monitor's Integrated Strategy and Finance practice, describes typical behaviors of shareholder activists and how CEOs and boards of directors can deal with them. 

Top-line growth does exist in a recession, but finding it requires that marketing leaders be relentless in their pursuit of ways to redefine the playing field, be it through innovative go-to-market models, offer structures, or doubling and tripling down on the highest potential brands or segments.

In this paper, Monitor's Mark Pocharski explains how the strongest marketing organizations provide insight to help their companies make profitable decisions and minimize risk.

These are unprecedented times for corporate executives—incredible volatility in the markets, sinking consumer confidence, a new financial crisis every week.  As a result, executives need to act quickly to tackle short term problems while setting the stage for long term growth. While we’ve dealt with recession before, the level of volatility and structural change posed by this crisis calls for a radically different playbook of options for achieving growth. 

In our view, there are certain, key levers companies can pull to find real growth and address the uncertainty.  The topics covered here can help shape your leadership agenda.

In today’s increasingly volatile economy, companies that make informed technology decisions can gain a significant edge over their competition without spending more on technology to do so.  This paper examines the forces that have prevented some companies from unlocking the strategic potential of their technology assets and highlights the tools top-performing companies have employed to drive growth. 

Once at the mercy of marketers, customers have developed coping mechanisms to combat the torrent of messages that come their way. Companies need to move past traditional approaches to get their attention.

In this Conference Board article Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Yakir Siegel, both partners at Monitor Group, discuss five principles that can help companies better focus marketing investment decisions in a challenging world of new technologies and delivery channels.