A business environment in which carbon emissions carry new costs creates a different competitive context. To succeed in this new environment, companies must reevaluate their core strategic choices, rethink their critical sources of competitive advantage and invest in new capabilities.

In this Harvard Business Review cover article, Robert H. Miles, a senior adviser to Monitor, outlines six organizational problems which can slow corporate change, and explains how to attack them sequentially.

Companies need to look beyond their walls to compete in these tumultuous times. Open innovation can help businesses more reliably discover new ideas, but they need discipline to pursue the right opportunities with the right approaches. Read more and see other articles in our series.

In this video Eamonn Kelly outlines four key discontinuities driving global change and identifies how leaders can take action to gain competitive advantage. It is part of a special series explaining how leaders can seize opportunities during tumultuous times.

Controlling costs has become a necessity for every business in these difficult and uncertain times. But taking costs out of an organization carries significant risks as well as opportunities. How companies approach cost reductions now will help determine their financial health and competitive position when the recovery takes hold.

In this paper, Monitor's Josh Lee and Karin Stawarky discuss how adaptive cost management empowers business leaders to focus spending decisions on strategy and growth.

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.

“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.