Sharing knowledge across networks: The CEB and an alternative approach to strategy

An increasingly urgent question in consulting is “what has happened to strategy?” and one of the answers has to be that people are doing it for themselves. The danger of that approach is that companies become on the one hand too insular and on the other too dependent on the highly variable data that flies around the web for outside input.

An alternative approach is the building of networks that share knowledge across organisations. Recently I spoke to Christoffer Ellehuus, managing director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Corporate Leadership Council, about how such an approach works in practice.

“The idea for CEB came out of the thought that any functional executives, whether they are CIOs or in HR, despite being in different locations or industries, will share a lot of the same problems,” he says. “CEB works to collectively leverage the best in class solutions and share them with the network.”

This approach generally keeps the discussion rooted in the specific function—CEOs and general managers are not generally targeted as such, except for very specific topics. So the Corporate Leadership Council focuses on HR issues, while other programmes will look at the CIO.

“We do surveys that go across all the areas to discover what are the trends that cross all functions,” says Ellehuus. “But generally when you start to bring it up to CEO level you find that the majority of their issues are still rooted in the functional issues.”

Ellehuus stresses that this approach is very much client driven, rather than solution-driven:

“We are focused on an agenda that is driven by our members—we’re not saying we have designed the best in class supply chain management approach,” he says. “We survey clients and ask them, what keeps you up at night. That becomes an agenda for research and analysis.”

Ellehuus says the research is very quantitative, particularly in HR where it addresses a lot of “soft” issues—but from the perspective of the business as a whole:

“For example, the big challenge this year has been how to keep people motivated and engaged,” says Ellehuus. “People are afraid of productivity declines, they are worried about losing their most valued people.”

Recent research in HR for example has discovered some radical disconnects between the programmes HR departments have been running and actual outcomes in the business.

“For example we discovered that improving employee performance has nothing to do with the appraisal process—80% of the things that matter come from the line managers’ competence,” says Ellehuus. “So we took a lot of those kinds of core insights and created training modules for line managers, such as 10 simple rules for any line manager that will have the most impact on the performance of their teams.”

Corporate Leadership Council currently has a membership of 1500 firms, which Ellehuus says gives them coverage of 85% of the Fortune 500. These form the core of the research base although CEB will also go outside it for example for research into growth areas such as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia India, China) countries. Companies that want to build on the insights can draw on the services of CEB’s executive advisers, or ask for customised presentations or more customised survey.

However, Ellehuus stresses that the main business of the company is maintaining the network and its members, which solves all problems of conflicts of interest:

“It’s all about the membership fee, we have no other interests, no other thing to sell you, we won’t partner with vendors,” he says. “One thing we do to help the organisation is to unleash the value of all these insights by looking at what is the next step they need to do.”

By using scalable resource Ellehuus believes he can provide far higher quality and more specialised information than is available from “self-organising” networks while radically undercutting the sort of support available from strategy consultants.

“These days many people are so budget-restrained that we are positioned as the ‘anti-consultants’ rather than just a cheaper solution,” he says. “Most will use us as a way to displace consultancy cost, so they can maybe eliminate a quarter of the cost of using a strategy house.”

That doesn’t mean that CEB’s business has been unaffected by recession—for good or bad:

“The key thing that impacts us is uncertainty, where people don’t have a priority and their companies don’t know where they are going,” he says. “A soon as they know they are hitting the rocks then they want to know: how do they downsize most efficiently, what have other companies learned?”

So has strategy fallen off the agenda or is it entering organisations in a different way? As companies move forward into what is hopefully a period of recovery, it will be interesting to see what approaches they adopt—and which ones prosper.


All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.