“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.

Larry Keeley, an innovation expert and partner at Monitor, explains how Kodak’s famous failure to enter digital photography quickly can be a useful lesson for executives looking to innovate now. He writes that a new form of strategic thinking, convergences, “gives leaders a deeper sense of the interdependencies that connect firms, products, systems and services in new ecosystems” and reveals emerging opportunities, typically at the junction of new technologies and customer behaviors.

The global economy faces serious risks of a second “great recession” if world leaders fail to cooperate on solutions to prevent “near-term economic divisions to devolve into deeper-seated geopolitical divisions,” write Peter Schwartz, Jonathan Star, and Nikhil Prasad Ojha in The Times of India newspaper. In this piece that demonstrates scenario thinking, the authors project the global economy is likely to go through a near-term period of low growth. The long-term prognosis then depends on the actions—or failures—of leaders to respond.

In this special report on innovation in India’s Business Today magazine, Nikhil Prasad Ojha, Parijat Ghosh, Sachin Khandelwal, and Harsh Kapoor from Monitor describe key principles of innovation used by successful companies, from mobile phone provider Safaricom in Kenya, to Mexican cement company Cemex, to GE’s green energy products, to create new ways of doing business. “As markets mature and become more competitive, innovation has become an imperative for firms to survive and win,” the authors write.

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.

Consumer product manufacturers invest millions of dollars into channel partnerships to influence the way consumers experience their product at the point of sale. These trade investments take many forms, ranging from standard rebates and cash payments to strategic collaboration programs. For many manufacturers in recent years, trade investment levels have increased faster than the sales they are designed to influence, contributing to eroded profit margins. In this article, part of the Monitor Perspectives white paper series, Christine Delivanis and Martin Zimmermann outline the challenges to sound trade investment and present four steps to maximizing manufacturers’ trade investment returns.

In a discussion with the “Cambodia’s Global Dialogue,” a public affairs program on the Southeast Asia TV (SEATV) channel in Cambodia, Chris Malone, a senior partner at Monitor, explains the how the firm helps governments and industries around the world assess and improve their regional and global economic competitiveness.

When it comes to innovation, sometimes organizations need to get out of their own way. Orthodoxies, or tightly held beliefs that guide a company’s decisions, can be dangerous to a company’s success, write Monitor’s Bansi Nagji and Helen Walters in the Fall 2011 issue of Rotman Magazine, published by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. As a result, they write, orthodoxies must constantly be sought out and “flipped” for a business to stay at the forefront of its industry—or even to stay afloat.

“At a time when we are constantly being told to value the new and the different, it may come as a surprise to learn that the standard, the shared and the common can be strong drivers of transformation,” writes Monitor’s Henry King, in this essay for Fast Company Design. King, who is an associate partner with the innovation strategy firm Doblin, part of Monitor Group, cites five illustrations from business to demonstrate how standardization—in business processes, common organizational goals, common platforms, shared cultural values, and equipment interfaces—are critical tools of innovation.

In this webcast, Monitor’s thought leaders discuss the latest research into the psychology behind decision-making and memory formation, using this framework to identify a practical approach for getting customers to remember your company’s messages and assessing the quality of your customer engagement strategy.