Corporate Executive Board Reviews

Pros

Very easy to get leaves and off time, no questions asked!

Cons

Incompetent managers.
No scope for learning and development.
Biased review system.
Dated technology.
Self proclaimed "Best in the industry".
Millions of best practice research but the irony is none is implemented within the organisation.
No training and development of employees, employees are least valued
and I can go on...

Advice to Senior Management

Implement the best practices within the organisation.
Hire people with good management skills. Do look beyond their top ranked degrees, in terms of experience and knowledge.

Pros

Fortunate to have exceptionally qualified and supportive management.

Cons

Overall corporate strategy is sketchy at best due to poor acquisitions and Sr leadership.

Advice to Senior Management

Stick to what you are good at - quality research. Build relationships and stop promoting young inexperienced people into management roles.

Pros

Smart people
Youth-oriented culture
Collegial environment
Good benefits
Amazing direct exposure to senior executives in big business
Strong employee value proposition at entry level and senior ranks

Cons

Terrible work-life balance
Inconsistent manager quality
Declining career advancement opportunities
Risk-averse corporate culture
At headquarters, you have to work in Rosslyn

Advice to Senior Management

Talent is not as inexhaustible resource! Take better care of your AD and DIrector level staff or risk quality decline at AD or Director levels.

Pros

Smart people, great work-life balance, great benefits, fantastic exposure to senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies, dedication to community service

Cons

poor front-line managers, some people take the work-life balance to the 'life' extreme, some practices/teams are more isolated than others.

Advice to Senior Management

Continuously train your front-line managers--just because someone has an MBA doesn't mean they are effective at managing teams of people.

Pros

Great location to work in.
There are smart people inbetween the vast numbers of cold callers they recruit
It is perhaps a great place to learn about corporate politics and 'internal brand building'
You can earn a lot of commission if you luck out in the right department
You can get a solid years experience under your belt.

Cons

Over the past several years, many of the well respected leaders at the organisation have left. They obviously knew of the impending decline of the organisation ahead of time. The business model is now more akin to that of a recruitment consultancy than one that produces 'world class research'. Phone as many executives as possible, feed them a generic script, hope they buy the services. Repeat.
Staff retention is terrible - and this only adds to the negative feeling about the place. More often that not, someone less able will be catapulted into the void as a 'stretch opportunity' when perhaps it would be best to actually back fill the position with a worthy replacement.
Terrible management. Doing well as an individual contributor suddenly means you are capable of man management without training. I believe the number one reason for employee's leaving is 'poor manager quality'. This is CEB's own research! If you happen to be managed by one of the few good managers it's surprising to see the difference in output quality from those direct reports.
Career development - chances of progression from the entry level position are slim to none these days.
Very, very cliquey organization.

Advice to Senior Management

Sort out your middle management team. You have a large % of the workforce dissastisfied with low morale.

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).

Pros

Intellectually stimulating - everyone is interested in learning more and sharing what they've learned. Promotion and development potential are all pretty strong (as long as you actively pursue them). Chance to gain cross-functional perspective and gain exposure to senior executive perspective is better than you'll find in most organizations...the trust invested in even green employees is pretty impressive.

Cons

Senior management does not seem to be very strategic or good at managing a mid-size organization. Leaders have sometimes half-invested in company "big bets" and done a poor job of communicating vision internally and externally. As well, while the company has made good strides at promoting leadership development and grooming managers to support employees well, a lot depends on one's individual manager, and some bad situations have remained so for far too long (as an example, a manager I knew was bad not only for me but for the program took more than a year to be managed out of the organization).

Advice to Senior Management

Take the organizational pulse - more than just surveys, do the occasional "spot check" interviews with associates, junior managers, etc. to more proactively identify managers/leaders that do a good job of selling themselves upward but a worse job of managing those below them. Separately, while building out new roles/responsibilities, make sure individuals who take on those roles (and the associated risks) are tracked well and given a good opportunity to demonstrate and be rewarded for the value they bring (and risk they accept).

Pros

There are a lot of truly smart and friendly people who go out of their way to make you feel welcome. Work is more collaborative than competitive. Managers are the best I've ever had.

Cons

Everybody is so young that you think you're still in college. There seems to be some indecision on the part of senior management in vision for the future.

Advice to Senior Management

Create a comprehensive plan and execute on it.

Pros

Work Life balance
Flexibility
Salary
Leaves
International Exposure (Daily interaction with US-UK folks)
Trips abroad
Remote Managers, hence there's no one to monitor you 24x7

Cons

Flat learning curve
Uninspiring Managers
Unfair HR Dept- A no. of performers were fired w/o any discussions during recession.
No Clarity on JD of IJPs

Advice to Senior Management

The Indian management team has a lot to improve. Some directors of CPS/IRPD keep an unnecessary check on employees of other practices which I totally disapprove.

Pros

Great place for graduates starting out
Good process to learn how to do things
Good work ethic for people with no outside interests
Great relationship with Wall St analysts which clouds the real situation inside the organisation

Cons

Research is suspect, in that since leaving and having a chance to work with research case subject firms found that activities were no longer performed in those companies. Research cases are not followed up post publication to see if they are still applicable.
New graduates are better off joining a proper consulting practice and having a skill that is transferable. There is little practical interaction with clients on 'how' as opposed to reading out the 'what' and hoping the very busy client can figure out how to implement the ideas.
Very little practical experience within CEB and most of the research is conducted be grads with peer review done by CEB insiders.
Despite its classification as a consultancy, this is a research company and therefore the quality of the research is critical to the success of the company product. This is not McKinsey despite what the ex McKinsey executives think. Its probably closer to Harvard Research and its difficult to justify the business model compared to a Harvard Business annual membership which delivers more leading insight in a year combined with a networking organisation membership, one or two decent seminars a year on topics that are important to your organisation and then spend the rest on quality consulting to actually implement what a client needs.
Everyone inside CEB knows the business model does not support growth and this fact was hidden by the recession, Revenue was in steep decline before the recession hit.The executive (and the Wall St analysts) desperately hope that the new acquisitions will deliver new revenue streams.

Advice to Senior Management

Middle management, move on as soon as you can so that you can continue your career in a part of your chosen profession with more growth possibility. The longer you stay, the more difficult it will be.
Junior management, only stay for 1 year with the title then move on. See above.
Executive are beyond heading advice as people have been saying the same things and nothing has changed. I'm sure you comfort yourselves that its only those that left CEB that criticize. Not true. Any senior executive with a 10% approval rating should be removed by the investors and would have been except that the recession cloaked the bad leadership.