One on One With CEB's Tom Monahan

Over the last three decades, CEB has seen tremendous, steady growth and double-digit profitability, advising a diverse client list on how to best keep up with an ever-changing industry and constantly shifting demands and expectations. CEB's success in this arena has Chairman and CEO Tom Monahan call his firm, "The Most Influential Company You've Never Heard Of." And they're just getting warmed up. Following a large acquisition, Monahan says 2013 will see CEB lead the analytic revolution in the area of Human Resources. Monahan spoke with us about the challenges facing executives on all levels, and the need to boost productivity even as staff meets its maximum capacity to take on new work. Monahan sat down with Consulting One on One to share some of his insights about emerging trends, opportunities and challenges in the marketplace, and why he sees a need for a re-tooling of the industry itself. Consulting: What are some of the emerging trends you're seeing in the global consulting market?

Monahan: CEB's installed base includes 85 percent of the Fortune 500 and the majority of similarly sized large cap companies globally. When we look across that universe, we see three trends emerging: One, an increasing urgency for solutions that are proven and can be implemented immediately— Organizations want and need to embrace out-of-the-box thinking, but they don't want to reinvent the wheel. Whenever and wherever possible, executives want to leverage peer learnings to save time and money rather than dedicating precious staff resources searching for new answers. Two, a deepening desire to bring science to practices that have been traditionally accepted as "art"—We see this manifesting across such core functions as talent management, compliance and sales. Perhaps the most notable of these for us has been the resonance of CEB's sales effectiveness work and the rapid global adoption of our Challenger Selling Model, which demonstrates that the ideal sales rep can be identified and cultivated through the application of human capital analytics and disciplined data analysis. And three, an enterprise-wide realization that talent is the biggest single driver of corporate performance and therefore, growth—Across the C-suite, executives are striving to meet increasing performance expectations without traditional tools, like hiring, at their disposal. To overcome these obstacles, they are turning to new developments in human capital that will enable increased team productivity.

Consulting: How is CEB rising to meet the new challenges presented by these trends?