“Effective stories that win both listeners’ hearts and minds are critical communications tools that can enable leaders to achieve difficult strategic goals,” write Doug Randall and Aaron Harms in an article in Strategy & Leadership magazine. The onus is on leaders—not their audience—to deliver a successful narrative that transfers meaning and motivation. The authors warn executives that their strategy initiatives are at risk every time the message they deliver is not convincing or clear.

Roger Martin, the author of Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, discussed his ideas for changing executive compensation, financial services regulation, and tax policies to rebuild an economy that generates prosperity and growth. The interview with Monitor’s Steven Goldbach is part of Monitor’s “Insights from the Field” series of discussions with leaders sharing their perspectives on important issues.

Agencies and departments at all levels of government are facing increased pressure to cut costs and become more efficient. In this article, leaders of Monitor’s High-Performance Bureaucracy® practice explain how to avoid the traps of traditional budget-cutting, and outline the three keys to “doing more with less.”

The benefits of having an entrepreneurial culture are clear—it leads to more effective and loyal employees, higher levels of innovation, and faster reaction times, just to name a few. But entrepreneurial environments aren’t just for small start-ups in new markets—even large companies in existing business sectors can create an entrepreneurial environment by employing five key enablers, explain Monitor’s Francesco Fazio, Joel Finlayson and Neil Pearse in this article.

The banking and insurance industries are facing significant transformations, as customers are raising their service expectations and finding that switching providers is easier than ever before. As a result, banking and insurance firms need to increase the transparency, simplicity and consistency of their customer service if they want to rebuild and retain customer loyalty, explain Monitor’s Silke Otremba, Aubry Pierre and Dominique Vincent.

Some think the phrase “high-performance bureaucracy” is an oxymoron, as bureaucracy is often associated with slow decision-making, high costs and inefficiency. But this doesn’t have to be the case—high-performing bureaucracies do exist, and there are ways for low-functioning bureaucracies to improve their performance, explains Monitor’s Bruce Chew in this pair of podcasts.

Many of today's CEOs have been "shellshocked by crisis," making them extremely cautious and conservative, writes Monitor co-founder Joseph Fuller in Newsweek. “Companies will cast off their conservatism only when they accept that the standards they used to assess opportunities and evaluate risk in the past are no longer appropriate,” Fuller writes, adding that “the marketplace will ultimately reward those who stare down their fear and act.”

RE-AMP—a coalition of nonprofits and foundations in the Midwest United States working to reduce regional global warming emissions 80 percent by 2050—has created a high-impact network to achieve progress. In this paper, Monitor Institute identifies six key principles that have made RE-AMP’s network so effective.

The world’s rapidly growing megacities represent significant opportunities for companies seeking new markets and justify a unique approach to an important source of potential growth. In this article, Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Mark Pocharski explain what it takes for companies to build winning strategies to take advantage of this growth opportunity.

The Monitor Institute, the social change division of the Monitor Group, published a case study examining how KaBOOM!, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building playgrounds in the United States, innovated its approach to scale by putting its model online for others to copy. Instead of replicating a traditional nonprofit approach to organizational growth, KaBOOM! is using the Internet to disseminate its model, empowering local communities to self-organize to build their own playgrounds using free resources and guidelines on the KaBOOM! website.