We hear from a great many of our member companies that in this slow-growth economic environment, they are looking to new markets for growth, which often means an increased international focus.  Global success, however, doesn’t come easy.  McKinsey & Company recently published an article entitled, “Understanding your globalization penalty,” based on research showing that multinational companies are generally less healthy (e.g., innovative, aligned around common goals) than their less global counterparts. 

The latest cross-functional research effort here at the Corporate Executive Board provides additional insight into the source of the difficulty – and potential solutions.  Too many international growth efforts focus only on market-level investments, failing to address how corporate center functions need to adapt.  Members can download this study and review support resources here.

So, is your company – and is your team – ready to capture global opportunities?  I can recommend four ways to address this question:

1)      Take CEB’s Assessing Global Readiness Diagnostic.  Learn what attributes characterize a globally ready corporate center, and assess how your organization stacks up.  Participants get a custom analysis of their responses and suggested resources for further learning and developing an improvement strategy. 

2)      Compare your team’s current organization and processes to MREB best practices for supporting global business needs.  Learn from global leaders such as Reckitt Benckiser, Nestlé, and DuPont. 

3)      Explore and manage opportunities for offshoring market research.  While many business processes are routinely sent to staff in low-wage countries, client-side market research staff are more frequently been located in the markets where the company sells its products and services.  But offshoring can be an opportunity.  MREB members click here to use the Board’s Sourcing Decision Tool and obtain practical advice for managing an offshore team. 

4)      See whether you follow the three imperatives for successfully managing dispersed teams: engage remote staff, personalize career support, and foster knowledge sharing.  Learn from leaders such as Wells Fargo and Kellogg’s. 

Any global challenges you face not addressed here?  Please let me know.  Also, I’d be interested in your own success stories in navigating the challenges of providing market research to a global business.

It was a real delight to see so many of our members at the Corporate Researchers Conference in Chicago September 21-23.  As I reflect on the event and continue to speak with several of you who joined us and our co-sponsors there, I’m struck by how practical and actionable the discussion was. 

I’d love to hear from you what you took away from the sessions.  To kick off the discussion, let me share a few of mine:

• Finbarr O’Neill, formerly a senior auto industry executive, now CEO of J.D. Power and Associates, spoke powerfully of executives’ need for “good enough, actionable information.” Our latest quantitative research confirms how business decision-makers are willing to trade off speed for accuracy of information, especially when they see a decision as urgent.  Leading companies like Motorola Mobility are using existing knowledge to respond quickly to urgent business questions, significantly increasing Research’s impact.  Click here for more detail.  
• Ian Lewis, our friend and longtime member at Time Inc., spoke insightfully of the consequences of information proliferation.  First, business partners suffer from “information fatigue.”  Second, survey research has lost its edge as a uniquely valuable resource.  This has profound implications for the role and priorities of the market research function. 
• Chris Frank from American Express and Paul Magnone from Openet shared a lot of great thinking on how to focus business dialogue on the essentials – and avoid the feeling of Drinking from the Fire Hose.  One of my favorite nuggets was the value of focusing any research inquiry on “essential questions.”  One way to think of these is to ask yourself (and your business partner) what “I wish I knew,” the one fact you wish you had or phenomenon you wish you could explain.  We’ve seen this technique successfully implemented at a number of companies.  Click here for more detail. 
• Last but not least, our member Jen Miff from Motorola Mobility, paired with the Board’s own Martha Mathers, shared her team’s staffing model, which enables greater focus on synthesis.  If you missed the session, hear this replay of Jen’s discussion of this practice during an MREB webinar last year. 

I hope these reflections are also interesting to those of you who missed the conference.  Perhaps we’ll see you there next year!

Our parent organization, the Corporate Executive Board, is advising all our clients across our many function-specific membership programs to boost their “Insight IQ” by improving their and their teams’ ability to complement data with judgment.  I consider this a must-read for every client-side research professional, because it makes a powerful argument for Research’s role in language designed to resonate with senior executives across functions.  You can download a copy of this Executive Guidance, entitled “Overcoming the Insight Deficit,” by clicking here. 

Let me summarize the argument briefly, then layer on how I’d use it to make the case for Research.  First, “Overcoming the Insight Deficit” in brief:

• Large organizations spend a fortune on data on suppliers and customers, but less than 40% of staff use that data effectively – they lack the “Insight IQ” to do so.
• “Insight IQ” comprises three elements:

1. Attainability: information is available and easy to find
2. Usefulness: information is of a known quality and usable format
3. Capability: employees have the ability and predisposition to analyze information effectively

Leading organizations boost their Insight IQ in four ways:

1. Talent: develop employees’ critical thinking skills.
2. Decision process: challenge biases.
3. Information management: manage information with the same executive attention you put to talent, capital, or brand. 
4. Tools: make information usable.

Now, what does this mean for Research?  First, for customer-related information at a minimum, information attainability and usefulness – two-thirds of Insight IQ – is Research’s job.  How else can we claim to represent the “Voice of the Customer”?  This means so much more than ensuring that market research is valid and reliable; it’s about integrating primary research with other data sources and communicating what we know in a consistent format that business partners can understand and use.  It’s also about ensuring they know that this information exists and where to find it. 

Second, if an organization is going to get serious about customer-related information management, that should be Research’s job, too.  One of this study’s most interesting findings is that centralized information repositories (e.g., a single data warehouse) have no impact on Insight IQ, but central analytics teams do.  Many MREB members are that central analytics team, bringing together primary research, secondary and syndicated data sources, and customer analytics.  More probably should be. 

Looking for more specific advice?  I encourage heads of Research to make one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats on Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business.  You can also access best practices, research, and practical tools through our Web site on the following related topics:

• Knowledge Management and Portals
• Foundational Knowledge
• Communication

You may have noticed on our home page an announcement for Iconosphere, an annual event run by our sister company, Iconoculture.  It’s April 11-13 in Miami Beach – not bad, eh?  Michael Hubble and I will be there to represent MREB, and thought I’d give you a sneak preview of what we’re looking forward to:

• Invitation-only MREB presentation April 11.  Reserved for corporate research managers.  We’ll be introducing a new, comprehensive research skills framework and our latest advice on how to develop your team.  This builds on several skills-related MREB studies, including last year’s on Closing the Researcher Influence Gap, earlier work on insight productivity and consultative skills development, plus our experience engaging frontline staff through our various training and train-the-trainer workshops.
• Opening keynote address on innovation.  I’m really looking forward to best-selling author and innovation guru Steven Berlin Johnson’s talk on cultivating creativity and driving innovation and change.
• A few standouts among the breakout sessions: Read More »

As you put together your plans for 2011, let me suggest a handful of ways we at the Board may be able to support you in the coming year:

1. Build key skills – for yourself or your team.  Most researchers have strong technical and analytical skills.  But business impact is significantly driven by rarer competencies such as consultation, insight, communication, and influence.  (For more information, see our study, Driving Strategic Impact.)  These competencies often develop quite slowly because gaps are undiagnosed and training opportunities are rare.It doesn’t have to be that way.  The Board is proud to offer a new diagnostic tool, the 2011 Research Skills Diagnostic, which allows staff to prioritize areas in which to seek training and development, incorporating individual feedback from business partners.We also continue to offer a robust suite of training workshops on topics such as influencing, communicating, generating insight, and consulting.
2. Develop and communicate foundational knowledge. Leading research functions have refocused attention on building foundational knowledge platforms, not just executing projects.  In addition to sharing best practices and examples, the Board can help you connect with peers who are also working on foundational knowledge and uncover the most successful techniques for socializing knowledge to business partners.
3. Improve insight generation. Insight is very difficult to teach, but there are two key levers research managers can pull to increase insight productivity on their team: (1) hire more experienced, intellectually curious staff (see our profile of the “insight-ready researcher” if you want to pursue this option) and (2) foster an environment within the team that unleashes everyone’s full insight potential.The latter often represents a “quick win” that improves team performance at very little cost.  Read more in our recently revised and expanded resource center on “Analysis and Insight Generation.” Or come to our next “train the trainer” workshop on insight generation, where we will teach you how to customize and deliver a ready-made workshop that will get your team focused on and excited about insight.
4. Get smart on specific research types, such as analytics, competitive intelligence, and NPD/innovation. We just published a white paper on integrating analytics into market research; stay tuned for our next installment, on getting more strategic value out of analytics capabilities.   See also our comprehensive guide to competitive intelligence.  Or, join our upcoming webinar on “radical innovation.”Looking into a new, unfamiliar research type?  Check out our Research Project and Methodology Taxonomy for a quick primer.
5. Stay on top of research trends related to social media. “Social media” remains one of the hottest, most popular topics of interest to market researchers.  Unfortunately, discussion on the subject tends to yield more heat than light.  Review our white paper on what value Research can – and can’t – get from social media today, and join us for a 2011 update with live participation from practitioners and experts.

I do hope one or more of these piques your interest.  Let me know what else you’d like to see from the Board – your feedback drives our agenda.  Here’s to a successful and prosperous 2011!