Corporate Executive Board Reviews

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

Pros

Young and engergetic employees
Clean and beautiful building
Nice location
Room to grow (Kind of)

Cons

Young Managers (Need to take classes on management)

No room for error at all....mistakes are not kindly taken here....

poor work/life balance

Advice to Senior Management

Just because 'Manager' is in your title, doens't make you one. If you have direct reports, take some classes on communication and effecitve management skills. You aren't there to be a baby sitter, you are there to guide the firm talent.

Upper management, please take some time to speak to direct reports of middle managers alone. You'll find what they have to say, very very interesting.

Pros

Good people, interesting clients to work with. The environment is very dynamic with constant interaction

Cons

sometimes decisions don't seem to be fully thought out before rolling out across the board to the membership. At times, the company seems to try to differentiate its product line too much, when the members just want something they can use.

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.

Pros

Fun work colleagues, great office location with nice amenities (cafeteria, gym, etc), competitive salary and bonuses, relaxed office environment compared to other main-stream consulting firms.

Cons

I was caught in the layoffs of early 2009 and yes, I am still bitter about it. I was surprised and disappointed by the almost trivial way staff were firstly selected for lay-offs (favoritism was def a factor) and secondly the way layoffs were handled. While there is no way to lay anyone off easily, CEB did an awful job with this. They sent planners, herded people into an assembly line and then a conveyor belt of HR Generalists delivered the news. People were escorted back to their desks and out of the building. It made me feel worse that they didn't trust me to leave gracefully. To this day, I still have not heard from my direct manager. No call to say how sorry she was about the lay-off or even fake sympathy for how it turned out. Maybe it was hard for her considering how many staff were laid off, but a call would have been the least after working for her for 4 years. Other than my exit, I struggled to cope with the 'young' managers; many of whom had never worked anywhere else and were unable to be mentors or leaders. I also saw favoritism at play during performance reviews and when promotions came up. The opposite was of course another factor - blackballing. I saw quite a few people who were good at their job (as good as their co-workers) being passed up for promotions because of blackballing by someone with a chip on their shoulder. I miss the CEB I knew and joined ... the one where Derek Van Beever's 'Enterprise' speech made us feel like masters of the universe. I think those days are long gone!

Advice to Senior Management

Despite the poor stock performance and lay-offs of hundreds of staff, you all kept your own jobs and I am sure raked in a nice bonus each April without fail. Nice going!

Pros

- Interesting to learn and profile best practices
- Exposure to many different types of clientele
- Work/life balance was pretty good

Cons

- Unclear where company wants to go in future
- Too focused on meeting scores and research - research not actionable enough

Advice to Senior Management

Should allow more decentralized innovations among departments. Every dept is too standardized.

Pros

Plenty of opportunity to work on exciting and challenging projects in support of some of the best companies in the world. Found the work to be intellectually stimulating and worked alongside some of the smartest people I have ever met.

Cons

Long work hours, and tremendous travel requirements that are not supported by appropriate T&E policies. Lack of transparency into major initiatives and an unfortunate adherence to legacy approaches has painted the business into the corner.

Advice to Senior Management

Innovate. Rethink the insight/advisory business and the products or solutions that support it.

Pros

young energetic hard working colleagues
lots of happy hours/lunches
can dress casually to work
great location/new building
good work/life balance

Cons

working with people that don't really know what they want to do. it was like working with smart people with no direction.
onboarding/training could have been better
career development could have been better

Advice to Senior Management

if i were to offer some advice or feedback to the leadership of corporate executive board, it would be to spend more energy on the career development of a new employee.

Pros

CEB has a lot of young, relatively recent college grads which makes it a great place to meet new people who are making the transition from college life to the "real" world.

The work provides a good introduction and overview to the business world and exposes you to some very knowledgeable and capable practitioners. It is a good place to learn a bit for two or three years and then move on.

If you enjoy sales and have lots of luck, then you can make pretty good money in an okay environment.

Cons

The company suffered greatly during the recession, laying off a substantial portion of its staff. Morale was high when I joined the firm, but collapsed even before anyone was cognizant of the macroeconomic disruption.

Managers tend to be people promoted when times were good and so lack experience, polish, and maturity. Fear is too often the main motivation tool when leadership by example would be so much more effective (i.e., hard-work, being the first one in and the last one out, taking pride in the work, etc.).

It is a place where confidence always trumps competence, and while the firm pushes for contrarian thinking, it seems unwilling to really embrace truly radical, "game-changing" ideas; choosing instead to rest on past successes.

I always felt somehow lied to when interacting w/ anyone from middle or senior management - it almost seemed like part of the culture to mislead and obfuscate.

Don't go there coming out of a graduate school program - you are sure to be underwhelmed by the caliber of people and the amount of bluster. Yes, there are some great people and interesting projects, but probably not enough to really make you feel that your degree advanced your career prospects in any meaningful way.

Advice to Senior Management

For a relatively small firm, it is quite hierarchical and overly centralized. Yield more power to individual employees and see what emerges.

Stop saying "we are the best in the world at X." It is insecure and arrogant - a terrible combination, and probably never even true. And it is completely unnecessary to motivate employees!

Do not confuse correlation w/ causation.

Pros

The people - some of the most talented young people I've ever worked with
The alumni - because the talent pool is so strong and the turnover rate is high, there is a great network to draw upon
The clients - if you are member-facing, your personal network with C-level executives can be fantastic

Cons

Senior leadership - historically the leadership pool has been confined to a small core group of old timers who have been there since the 1993-1998 time period. Few are able to break in
Career advancement - see above
The product - the research remains a nice to have, not a must have
Translating skills and experience to the market - CEB is organized in such a unique way that it isn't always self-evident how one's skills transfer outside the CEB/ABC org structure

Advice to Senior Management

Move on and let some outsiders assess the situation and make some tough calls. Better yet, enable a private equity firm to purchase CEB, take it private, and cut out the fat.