Membership in the Corporate Executive Board saves executives time and money by helping them to avoid reinventing the wheel in addressing problems they share with their peers across industries and around the world. Through our shared-cost membership structure, we are able to produce actionable research at the quality standard of the leading consultancies, but at a fraction of the cost.
No. In fact, members judge us on our ability to conserve their time—to focus them on the correct set of strategic issues, to compress the time required to review the best current practices, and to weed out the bad ideas quickly. We publish best practices in a highly structured, graphical format that is meant to allow for rapid evaluation and assessment. Our executive education and decision-support tools help to compress time-to-implementation in even the most progressive organizations.
This process is entirely member driven. On an ongoing basis, we poll the members to identify their most vexing challenges, and we select for detailed examination the most urgent and widely shared problems. Sudden market and economic events are also addressed by the membership.
Our member relationships generally provide the most value when they are housed with the seniormost executive dedicated to that function, who is able to direct our strategic research agenda to enterprise-level concerns and focus our resources on the organization's most critical priorities. With this overall direction, we are then able to interact on a day-to-day basis with direct reports and other functional staff throughout the member organization.
Three reasons in particular stand out. First, the most progressive companies recognize that a network has value to the extent that individuals participate in it--—and that no one (themselves included) is best at everything. Second, members have discovered the “two-way value” present in interviews with our researchers and the value of findings from research underway. Finally, we are meticulous about member confidences. Members should feel comfortable that any information shared with our research teams is completely confidential unless and until they authorize its release.
No. Members choose whether or not to participate in individual research projects, as schedule and preference permit. However, more than 90% of our members participate in our telephone and on-site interviews, generally reporting that they learn as much as they contribute through their interactions with our research staff.
Each member relationship is coordinated by a dedicated team consisting of relationship management and research staff. This team reaches out at the beginning of each membership year to create a service plan responsive to individual member needs and then uses this plan as a blueprint to guide action across the year. This team is “on call” to respond to any requests or needs that might arise.
We convene two types of meetings: Principals-Only Retreats, in which we preview research and manage discussion among our seniormost member contacts, and Staff Briefings, sequenced and designed to accommodate large numbers of interested staff members. Attendance at the former is limited to the seniormost functional executive, but all of our forums are designed to offer a “safe space” for sharing, free from consultants, vendors, and the media.
We have attempted to structure the membership experience so that virtually all services are available in unlimited quantity to members—as many copies of studies as are desired to communicate our findings, as many attendees at our Staff Briefings as members find useful, and unlimited access to our online resources. Some services, such as the annual on-site visit or short-answer research, require limitation or queuing for reasons of cost and logistics, but it is our overall intent that members feel free to call on us without fear of additional charge.
The Corporate Executive Board is organized as a series of standalone membership programs, each serving a distinct executive constituency and maintaining its own content archive and dedicated research and service staff. Member executives subscribe to individual research programs, as they desire, and designate staff within their organizations to benefit from direct access to our services
Quite seldom—it is truly an exceptional event. Even so, all requests are honored. We believe the guarantee, however seldom invoked, is consistent with our service ambition, and we are eager to learn of and have the opportunity to correct any dissatisfaction that might arise in a member's experience with us.
We have no commercial relationship with any consulting firms, nor do we engage particular consultants in our work. That said, we do discuss ideas with consultant experts who are well versed in the topics we are addressing for the membership and routinely cite consultants in our studies if they have contributed to the thought therein.
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