Economy, Strategy & Finance Briefs
2019
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What The Conference Board’s C-Suite Challenge Means for Innovation Leaders
February 27 | John Metselaar, Economy, Strategy & Finance Center Leader, Europe, The Conference Board | Rita Shor, Co-leader of the Innovation and Digital Transformation Institute, Program Director for the Product & Service Development Council, and Co- Program Director for the Innovation Leadership Council | Comments (0)This year’s C-Suite Challenge painted a clear picture of how corporations’ most senior executives see the future, and what priorities and interventions are required to succeed in it. We have been looking at the insights through an Innovation & Productivity lens to help Innovation leaders best influence the priorities and efforts ahead.
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Explaining Harley Davidson’s Mid-Life Crisis
February 25 | Gad Levanon, PhD, Former Vice President, Labor Markets, The Conference Board | Comments (0)Spending on motorcycle sales are almost exclusively concentrated in middle-aged, white households. It turns out that in the next ten years, the number of consumers in this group is likely to shrink faster than any other population group in the US. We predict that these demographic shifts alone will lower spending on motorcycles by 3.7. Motor cycles are just one example of a product class where a core group of customers is aging out of a key demographic.
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The Top Five Things I Learned at the 2018 Lisboa Web Summit
February 13 | John Metselaar, Economy, Strategy & Finance Center Leader, Europe, The Conference Board | Comments (0)"Save the web: technology should serve humanity, not undermine its core values and institutions" is just one of John Metselaar's takeaways from this year's Lisbon Web Summit. As more than half the world's population becomes digitally connected, industry, governments, citizens and academia need to work together to keep the "digital peace."
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C-Suite Challenge 2019: Labor Markets Implications
January 25 | Gad Levanon, PhD, Former Vice President, Labor Markets, The Conference Board | Comments (0)C-suite executives are taking notice of global talent shortages. Attraction and retention of top talent was the top ranked internal hot button issue by CEOs in every region of the world. At the same time, wage increases are ranked among the bottom of the hot-button issues across regions. This is in line with current wage data for most regions, but with the wage acceleration in recent quarters in many parts of the world, we do expect this to change in 2019.
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Central and Eastern Europe has one of the tightest labor markets in the world
January 17 | Frank Steemers, Former Senior Economist, The Conference Board | Comments (0)Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is the region with perhaps the most severe shortage of labor in the world. Many companies with operations in this region are running into hiring difficulties and labor costs are rapidly rising. While a problem for companies, workers are benefiting and taking home large real wage gains.
2018
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How Silicon Valley Works…Ecosystems Breaking Traditions for Transformations
December 19 | Victor Assad, CEO, Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting | Comments (0)Despite not understanding how Silicon Valley works, hundreds of corporations have started Silicon Valley innovation labs because they know that digitization is rapidly changing everything, and their corporate cultures are too siloed, insular, slow to accept, slow to use, and slow to commercialize the innovation they desperately need to survive.
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The Unemployment Rate Does Not Fully Capture Labor Market Slack
December 13 | Frank Steemers, Former Senior Economist, The Conference Board | Comments (0)The unemployment rate may be overestimating current labor market tightness. An exercise on monthly employment changes shows that 63 percent of all newly employed people aged 25 to 54 in October 2018 were not actively looking for a job in the previous month. If employers are looking for slack in the labor market, they should find better ways to source and recruit the people who are not looking for work and allegedly not willing to work.
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A Case Study in Vitality: How John Hancock Improved Consumer Engagement in Life Insurance
December 10 | John Forsyth, Consumer Dynamics Leader, M&C Center, The Conference Board | Comments (0)How do you make life insurance fun and engaging for consumers? Brooks Tingle, President and CEO of John Hancock Insurance, spoke at the recent Customer Experience Conference on how John Hancock uses technology and consumer insights to enhance and innovate the customer experience in life insurance.
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Making Intangibles Tangible—Linking Corporate Attributes to Market Cap
December 05 | Dr. James Gregory, Senior Fellow, The Conference Board | Comments (0)An organization’s culture of innovation can be a robust predictor of financial performance, which highlights the importance to companies of measuring intangible assets. With intangible assets growing exponentially as a component of enterprise value, it is unproductive to allow them to go unmanaged.