We’re all marketers now

Engaging customers today requires commitment from the entire company – and a redefined marketing organization.

For the past decade, marketers have been adjusting to a new era of deep customer engagement. They’ve tacked on new functions, such as social-media management; altered processes to better integrate advertising campaigns online, on television, and in print; and added staff with Web expertise to manage the explosion of digital customer data. Yet in our experience, that’s not enough. To truly engage customers for whom “push” advertising is increasingly irrelevant... Read more

By Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill, McKinsey Quarterly. Source: Marketing & Sales Practice

Competing to hire the best and motivate the rest

Many of the world’s leading firms are engaged in an increasingly fierce war for talent. This is being fought on at least three fronts, each of which requires a somewhat different strategy. The first involves trying to hire the very best people in their field – because they are thought to be potentially far more productive than the merely competent... Read more

The Economist, Sept 10th 2011

Boards: When best practice isn’t enough

Why is it that despite all the corporate-governance reforms undertaken over the past two decades, many boards failed the test of the financial crisis so badly? In North America and Europe, for example, boards of financial institutions that failed to check management’s aggressive forays into US subprime mortgages saw their firms decimated during the 2008–09 economic meltdown. Indeed, the European Commission, the US Congress, and others found serious deficiencies in the way boards, particularly at financial institutions, guided strategy, oversaw risk management, structured executive pay, managed succession... Read more

McKinsey Quarterly, by Simon C.Y. Wong

The Higher-Ambition Leader

How a new breed of CEO delivers extraordinary economic and social value.

In 2009, as Citibank’s share price plunged to less than a dollar and HSBC’s profits dropped to less than a third of what they’d been in 2007, Standard Chartered Bank posted its seventh successive year of income and profit growth – without any help from emergency government funding. While the financial industry as a whole was facing a crisis of legitimacy, Standard Chartered was raising its standing with key customers and regulators alike, increasing its overall lending by 13%, its mortgage lending by 21%, and its loans to small... Read more

By Nathaniel Foote, Russell Eisenstat, and Tobias Fredberg, Harvard Business Review.

The importance of networking

Alun Parry, Director and Head of Crown & Marks' Higher Education Practice was invited to particpate in an event called 'Executive Search Consultants and You' which was arranged by the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in conjunction with the international Association of Executive Search Consultants. The focus of the panel was on providing insight into the executive search world, discussing which industries are growing and how candidates can get on the radar screen of retained executive search consultants. In the clip shown, Alun Parry is sharing his views on the Importance of Networking... Watch video