Corporate Executive Board Reviews in London, UK Area

Pros

Fun workmates
Profitable Company
High Energy
Young team

Cons

Long hours
Loads of cold calling
Loads of travelling
Limited ability to build relationships with clients

Advice to Senior Management

Perhaps providing more depth in the offering makes sense, although does potentially add higher fixed costs to service delivery

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

- smart colleagues
- opportunities for quick advancement
- access to senior client execs early on in your career
-

Cons

- inexperienced mgmt
- specific skill set that is not easily transferrable (outside of sales team)
- compensation lower than consulting

Advice to Senior Management

- Communicate company vision and strategy clearly to employees across the organization - particularly in times of change or economic turbulence

Pros

The atmosphere is a good one with most employees fairly young and outgoing. It's a fairly flat hierarchy so everyone is encouraged to express their opinions.

Cons

Extremely process driven. At times you will feel like the work you are doing has no point because it's all about getting from point (a) to point (b) in the process, only to have it all torn apart by some senior executive who has their "idea of the day".

Advice to Senior Management

Hire more external professionals to take on senior leadership roles. While it's important to promote from within, the majority of CEBs senior management has very limited experience outside the company, leaving them with very little "real world" experience.

Pros

Generally well paid and quite friendly amoungst the staff. Progression and promotion is rapid for the right people.

Cons

Generally well paid but on the whole most are treated as objects to be used. I was lucky in coming from outside so was treated with respect but those hired straight out of college are used and abused. Much of the initial treatment of new staff I suspect is to condition them to the proposed lifestyle. Having a life outside of the workplace is generally frowned upon and the idea of balance is limited. I think its relevant to look at how many people who work (certainly in the UK) at CEB and achieve promotions have families or commitments outside of work.

Hours worked are the number 1 measure of value to the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a change, most of the management at CEB started at CEB, which while a good indication of promoting from within it does mean they dont know how to do much other than CEB standard. No clever thoughts or bright ideas just the same thing. I would recommend to CEB management to move to other organisations to learn other techniques (rather than just read the research).

Pros

young company, they hire smart people so you are in good company. you tend to learn a lot so good personal knowledge enhancement.

Cons

the management sucks, they are useless. There is no management training so the bosses have no idea how to deal with subordinates. tend to have a one size fits all approach to managing people in the company and you slowly realise that your personal initiative is eroded and replaced with "company thinking" and the "company way of doing business". The work life balance is an unheard of concept here.

Advice to Senior Management

Use your own best practices!!!

Pros

interesting place to start after university, and an honest delivery of a good bonus if you hit your targets.

Cons

In the position listed above, you have no say over your team, you are possessed by a senior, who themselves have little to no intelligence in terms of creativity or delegation skills so as to let you do your job properly. As a middle manager, you actually have no power to deliver the kind of changes you want to make in your own team, in addition to being delivered dishonest messages regarding chnages in company structure.

Advice to Senior Management

avoid using middle managers in any sense, they are a waste of company revenue and act as over zealous 'kindergarten' supervisors of a team which hold real intelligence but are held back with the prospect of the next gig bonus.

Pros

CEB does produce some smart research and has the potential to genuinely help CXOs to perform better and make smarter decisions.

There are managers here who will do anything to help individual development and in general the staff here are all pretty smart people.

Cons

Until recently the upper levels of management have just been full of people who have been with the company for a decade or so. Whilst this is a great way to show new recruits that the possiblilites for advancement are endless, the reality is that there are so few new ideas for where to take this company that we have been steadily going downhill in terms of client perception and strategic growth.

All the brilliant insight we create is often delivered so poorly. Recently we have started developing smarter ways to enagage clients but we have only just stopped sending execs a load of web links and letting them work it out.

Advice to Senior Management

How long can you sit and watch the CEO preside over an almost exponential decline in share price. It would be great if we could just blame the current market conditions but this trend started about 6 months after he took charge. Great researcher? Yes. Great leader? Sadly not.

Stop looking at what used to work 10 years ago and start doing the things we know will work now.

Pros

wicked smart people; interacting with and advising senior executives at world class organisations; insightful information on pretty much any general management subject that will enable you to be smart about most any challenge an executive will face in their organisation; upside of becoming again a great organisation.

Cons

this is a place that has no long-term perspective for employees except for a few people at the very top; too many of the senior managers seem to be there to serve the "business model" rather than to build a great business serving executives and their teams; with a few exceptions I don't see executives actually care about the growth and welfare of their staff;

Advice to Senior Management

my advice would be for the Board to take a serious look at your CEO and ask yourself how many more rounds you'll give him before it's apparent that it takes a leader to run a company rather than a smart researcher;

senior management: seize the moment! There is great opportunity to take the opportunity we have now and serve our clients, refocusing as we are in parts of the business already on the fundamentals that made us to what we are: great insight and advice to executives. We grew too fast to execute on that promise, but our recent changes in parts of the business (FIN, parts of TECH) and the core strength of others (HR) are foundations on which to build a great and lasting success.

Pros

The people - ie. (your colleagues) - not senior management), the building itself, Bloomsbury Square, proximity to Picadilly, the cafe upstairs, the prospects you speak to and its location. Gaining the small sliver of business knowledge I eventually managed to glean from research and content delivery staff - some of whom were 2nd to none.

Cons

There are quite a number of downsides especially since last year - that have made career prospects within the London office not ideal

1.) PERSONAL VIEW: THE CLOSEST THING TO A CULT I HAVE SEEN - SYCOPHANTIC BEHAVOUR SEEMS TO REAP REWARD AND PROMOTION HERE RATHER THAN ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE.
BUSINESS VIEW: FAR TOO SALES FOCUSED AND VERY THIN ON THE GROUND ON CONTENT (both given to propects and imparted to employees) - THUS FOCUSED SOLEY ON GENERATING BUSINESS AND NOT KEEPING IT. Minimal business knowledge dispensed - even managers will admit that it is better hammering the same script rather than thoroughly researching content. Entry level is uasually within a sales position and although this company works as a management consultancy and obviously you may not have experience within your position be it legal, marketing, hr or finance - the focus on content is unbelievably low. Since one is dealing with probably some of the most respected and knowledgable individuals within their field it would seem logical to try and understand the content very well not only to be more productive on sales but to increase understanding for adequate career progression.
2.) Unbelievable repetative entry level role.....both scripting and content have essentially remained the same for over two years which would surely not be the best thing to do -especially during a recession. Encouragement by management to focus on pre-rehearsed scripting making entry into an actual business conversation very difficult.
3.) Management positions filled without adequate and specific transition training leading to poor leadership and understanding of individuals within the team. Consequently hiarachy seems to fall in line with a 'who-is-best-at-licking-the-senior-employees-boots' type business model. Managers use the same scripts even for performance reviews which can be very poor for morale as it feels like you are all replicas coming off a production line......it is so 'process' orientated that everything can feel very artificial, regurgitated and non-genuine most of the time. My previous manager seemed to be better suited to the roles of a creche supervisor if the truth is known, treating the team as if they were very immature not sales people in a professional corporate environment. Made working tedious, laborious and unprofessional and felt a bit patronising.
4.) Poor organisation - Prospective members may have been contacted and told of specific information many many times. However due to the lack of adequate documentation of correspondance and high staff turn over rate this nearly is always unknown. Sadly this can make one seem unproffessional even though there was no way of even knowing. Also no relationship is formed with prospects as they keep alternating lists among the team.
I have witnessed tenured employees actually enter into promotion for poisitons involving a number of interviews and then be informed afterwards that the promotion was not even available - if this is not unprofessional im not sure what is.
5.) Entry level staff purely viewed as an inital rung on the ladder of business generation and not valued - or only valued if 'suck-up' to senior management.
6.)Views of entry level employees rarely taken on board regardless of previous experience. I have witnessed ven constructive criticism and advice be rejected and negatively viewed by management, who seemingly are too concerned about their own job security rather than a thoughtful piece of advice to help the company on a larger level. This is quite hypocritical from an organsiation that claims to value its employees so much.

APOLOGIES IF THIS DOES SEEM HARSH BUT THESE ARE ALL VERY LEGITIMATE VIEWS WHICH I AM SURE WOULD BE VERIFIED BY BOTH EMPLOYEES AND FORMER EMPLOYEES ALIKE. SAD, AS IT IS A GREAT BUSINESS MODEL CARRIED OUT SPECTACULARLY BADLY. MR. MONOHAN IS A VERY INTELLIGENT , FORWARD THINKING AND ENGAGING GUY, BUT HIS IDEA HAD BEEN LOST WHILST BEING FILTERED DOWN THROUGH AN APPALLINGLY EXECUTED MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

Advice to Senior Management

Management need extensive restructuring - and further training and especially management of SA's - retention and contact of members and prosective members alike needs to be far more organised and valued. How could a prospect be able to take the organisation seriously if they have been contacted by 10 different people within a year and a half each of whom have no idea what the previous one has said. Especially if they are offereing exactly the same content as has been spoke of previously. A more holistic view is required, not just focussing on New Business Generation and the high value clients. SA's are the gateways to futrue positions within the company. They seem to have been treated like salmon swimming the river upstream - some will die some will make it, no real concern or value shown -its just a numbers game. It is evident from previous reviews that this sentiment is felt by a number of people - no company worth its salt should have an emplyee attrition rate like this.....and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Former employees can be like former friends.....how will you get more in the future if the old ones are not happy about the way you treated them and actively seek to warn people of you. Most people i know have left their former employer with a neutral view without any animosity, im sure if 80% of former employees were asked, they would actively disuade anyone from joining this company so as not to waste their time.