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.

“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.

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.

Nick Turner, a partner at Monitor Group and co-president of the Global Business Network, explains how scenario planning is a key to readiness in uncertain times in an article in CEO Journal.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are shifting investments away from the United States and Europe and into the Middle East and Asian economies, according to research released today by Monitor Group, one of the world’s leading advisory and consulting firms.

In this short presentation Monitor Partner Victoria Levy discusses a critical and timely issue facing most companies…how to get more out of marketing spend during recessionary times.

Today’s complex business environment presents an opportunity for executive development systems to create sustained strategic advantage for a company.  There is an undeniable edge for an organization that is able to routinely produce leaders who are equipped to take on the unique contingencies of their business. Making this happen, however, requires a shift in how companies think about developing their executives and how they manage the learning side of their business.