Productivity & Trade Briefs

The Conference Board recently released C-Suite Challenge™ 2018: Reinventing the Organization for the Digital Age. The insights for communicators, marketers, and digital media executives are extensive. We’ll explore some of those here.

In this blog we highlight from The Conference Board C-Suite Challenge™ 2018 the key insights related to labor markets.

Following a largely successful 2017, emerging markets could very well continue making strong economic progress in 2018. This year, it’s evident the growth of many developing economies will hinge on six main factors.

In a business environment where the weakest link in an ecosystem can jeopardize the entire community, effectively governing and managing third party risk takes on greater importance.

Intangible assets are especially important for China. Its remarkable rapid growth over the past three decades has enormously enlarged China’s manufacturing relative to that of the US, but in terms of labor productivity China appears to still be far away from American levels.

“I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world” were the words Steve Jobs used to describe Apple’s new headquarters in 2011. The grand vision at the heart of his last project is now being unveiled as Apple finalizes construction on Apple Park. Wired called the facility “insanely great (or just insane),” and in many ways it is exactly that.

As Defined Contribution (DC) plans have become the primary retirement vehicle in more organizations, there is a growing recognition that the method of payout and the options during the payout periods are an important part of making these plans real retirement vehicles rather than just asset accumulation plans.

Any company with substantial exposure to Brexit that hasn’t yet devised contingency plans to deal with a range of outcomes, including very bad ones, is about as far behind the curve as Britain’s current government seems to be right now.