Corporate Executive Board Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – There are a lot of good opportunities to grow and take on new responsibilities (whether you want them or not)
smart people

Cons – Your experience and quality of life while working at CEB are very dependent on your manager, and manager quality varies considerably across the organization. For the hours put in, compensation is on the low side.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Really smart people. Incredibly challenging work. Professional growth. Knowledge base. Compensation. Opportunities to travel. Rewards for high performance. Opportunities to meet with some of the smartest businessmen and businesswomen in the world.

Cons – Long, long days of work. Micromanagement. Incredible physical, mental and emotional stress to cope with. "What have you done for me lately?" mentality. Tagline should be, "We churn and burn our employees with the best of them!" Promote high performing front-liners into middle management positions without effectively evaluating their people-building skills, their level of maturity and without providing training critical to the success of the position--all to the detriment of the people they're supposedly leading.

Advice to Senior Management – Take inventory of your middle managers. Train them to spend far less time crunching metrics and far more time building their people.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Good environment; good people; good location.

Cons – Promise of advancement from position at hire, only to find that it is difficult to move within company from the current position when trying to apply within the company.

Advice to Senior Management – Offer some credible professional advice

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Pleasant colleagues to work with

Cons – Surprising lack of ethics in a wide range of activities, which is supported by management

Advice to Senior Management – May want to follow more of the advice that comes out of their ethics and compliance practice, at least the ethics part (I imagine compliance is ok).

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Fun group of people; young crowd; intelligent and helpful; good work/life balance

Cons – lack of clear advancement possibilities; upper management was ineffective and clueless

Advice to Senior Management – Make it more clear about advancement possibilities

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Great opportunity to learn from senior executives, and build professional capabilities. Work with some great people.

Cons – Senior leaders are sometimes short-sighted in how they run the business.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop and ask employees what they think and listen to what they are saying. Lots of good input from employees.

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – The thought process they teach you is very structure and it helps to provide you with an excellent analytical framework for examining problems. I still use their whole research model and thought process to look at basically any complex situation I come across

Cons – You never work for a client, you work for a fictional, hypothetical client that represents the average executive working in that field, so you don't really get much client interaction. Also, their research product is so specialized, its extremely hard to describe what you do to others outside of the company and have it seem valuable. Furthermore, you're consulting...but you're not really consulting. Companies come to CEB for advice, not solutions.

Advice to Senior Management – Promote managers who are interested in managing, not just interested in the intellectual study of business. Also, provide better opportunities for skills training, things like financial analysis, etc. that might make people more excited about staying on and might make them more fluent in conversations with executives

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – Young, smart and motivated employees
Prime location and great offices
Invaluable job experience, if new to workforce

Cons – Poor, inexperienced Directors, Managers, and Executives
Long, long work hours with inadequate compensation for time and effort
Failure to utilize its OWN RESEARCH to improve the culture and efficiency of the company

Advice to Senior Management – CEB's worst enemies aren't the economic downturn, the volatility of the markets, or the inability to secure, hold, and grow its membership; it is the company's failure to follow its own well researched advice and insincerity of its executives to follow its own well-crafted values. If CEB doesn't change its juvenile corporate culture it is a house of cards waiting to fall.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – smart people
valuable product
great place to start a career

Cons – grew too quickly
Tom Monahan - CEO - has officially ruined the place
lost majority of top talent

Advice to Senior Management – the pride of working at this company has been lost--- take a look back at the glory days and find a way to replicate the culture

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Corporate Executive Board

Pros – The best reason to work for CEB is the hard-working employee base. Kids right of college and other professionals that have been unemployed for a while have a lot they want to prove to their managers. That zeal really drives revenue, but is short-lived when those performers are not rewarded. I lost my best employees because I was not given the latitude to reward those that showed creativity and were eager to grow within the company.

Cons – Poor communication from the Board down. In terms of firm values, CEB has eroded them since I started with the firm many years ago to the point that nobody really knows where the firm is going.

CEB's corporate culture is demoralizing. Don't rock the boat. Don't think outside the box. This is how we have always done things. This is how it will be. No exceptions.

Web & technology staff is underutilized to the point they are obsolete. Everyone seems to be sitting on their hands waiting for the new online brand that was supposed to be done end of Q3 2009.

Despite what they said in their interviews, CEB does not effectively train anyone with "manager" or "director" in their job title. They'll give you outdated, internal research to read at your convenience. There's zero follow-up. If you ask for more guidance, they'll tell you to "figure it out" or more simply "just get it done". I gladly took a pay cut for a job that provided real training and believed in creating leaders.

Advice to Senior Management – Corporate Leadership Team should be renamed Zero Leadership Team. They are all like bobblehead figures just going along for the ride. Fire the CEO. Take the company private. Re-engage your employee base. And for heaven's sake, read your own best practice research.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend