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.

In these videos, thought leaders from the Monitor Talent Network tell us their thoughts about the future in business, communications, media and technology.

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.

Facing a sharp economic downturn and fundamental shifts in the way buyers learn and make decisions, companies must adapt their mix of marketing expenditures and develop new models for customer engagement. These new models, informed by insight into how customers think and behave, welcome shoppers’ involvement in shaping when, where and how they receive information and how they interact with products and brands.

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.

Gone are the days when companies looked at China as a monolithic land of 1 billion potential customers. Companies are now focusing on how to capture small segments of China’s giant market, and none of these segments is as attractive or as full of potential as the country’s rapidly growing—and multifaceted—middle class.

In this article from The China Business Review, Monitor Group's Kheehong Song and Allison Cui use Monitor's experience to explain how companies can succeed in the Chinese marketplace by analyzing and targeting the right segments of China’s diverse and rapidly emerging middle class.

“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. 

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.