Annual Essays - The Conference Board

The Conference Board
Annual Essays

In 1999, The Conference Board initiated the Annual Essays, a series of original and timely commentaries by thought leaders in economics and business management. Each year, the Essay, which is published in the Board's Annual Report, widens a lens on the big picture of business. The series extends The Conference Board's mission of creating spaces of learning in which leaders can find their solutions together.

2008 / 2007 / 2006 / 2005 / 2004 / 2003 / 2002 / 2001 / 2000 / 1999

2008
Each year, The Conference Board includes essays in the Annual Report that offer timely and informative commentary on a pressing business issue. Workforce readiness—the theme for 2008—is a subject that has become a significant concern for both business and society. To give the widest possible overview of this topic, we present three essays that address workforce readiness from a variety of perspectives, ranging from how to ensure lifelong learning to the importance of partnerships between companies and governments and educational institutions to a consideration of the questions that need to be asked today about the workplaces of tomorrow.
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2007
Sustainability—the theme of this year's Annual Essays—is a particularly urgent issue because it cannot wait for a generation or two for enduring change to take root. Businesses must begin finding new ways of satisfying human needs that respect ecological integrity. They must also start establishing the unprecedented partnerships with government and society that will be needed for true sustainable development to reach full fruition. To offer the widest possible discussion of this topic, we present three essays that address the topic from the perspectives of meeting the global energy challenge, China's efforts to balance sustainability with rapid growth, and one company's experience with integrating sustainable practices into its business operations.
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2006 - Sir Harold Evans
Innovate or Die - Lessons from the Groundbreakers Who Changed America
When I recently conducted a Google search for "American chief executives and innovation," I received 9,850,000 entries in just 40 seconds. By now, it may be up to 10 million or more. Obviously, no such search was possible when The Conference Board was established in 1916. Back then, I would have had to dedicate the rest of my life to discovering a fraction of what is now instantly on offer via the Internet, which is just one of the innovations undreamt of then that are now in the tissue of our everyday lives. Others include e-mail, antibiotics, television, statewide banking, FM radio, personal computers, the uplift brassiere, helicopters, instant cameras, cell phones, synthetic fibers, radio tuners, MRI scanners, scheduled airmail, transatlantic flights, fish fingers, microwave ovens, transistorized hearing aids, artificial insulin, lasers, jet planes — not to mention the introduction of container shipping that effectively initiated globalization.
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2005 - Douglass C. North
Corporate Leadership in an Uncertian World
Does understanding how a political-economic system functions help us to understand how a business organization within that system functions? The answer is clearly yes. In both cases, structures are created to organize markets; the efficiency of the resulting exchange will determine performance, whether of the economy as a whole or of the individual enterprise. Businesses are themselves concentrated institutional structures that, like the markets they operate in, are always fine-tuning their organizations to perceive the world more accurately and to evolve strategies that help them perform. In short, businesses, like economies, organize labor, develop incentive structures, apply knowledge and technology, and monitor their own performance.
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2004 - Warren Bennis
Building a Culture of Candor - A Crucial Key to Leadership
The word transparency crops up more and more in public statements by politicians and corporate officials — as if simply saying it were enough to guarantee it. Understandably. Now more than ever, we know that keeping secrets is dangerous for organizations and the people affected by them. But no amount of incantation or legislation can make an organization transparent. That happens only when an organization creates a culture of candor, one in which followers feel free to speak truth to power and leaders are willing to hear it.
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2003 - Peter G. Peterson
Global Interdependence - A Sobering Reality
In thinking about the emerging relationship between the United States and the global economy, I am struck by a rather curious anomaly: The more dominant our status as a military, economic, and geopolitical superpower, the more dependent we seem to have become on the rest of the world. Global interdependence is more than a new cliché-it is a sobering reality.

2003 - Thierry Desmarest
Corporate Social Responsibility Across the Borders - A European (and Multinational) View
Although Total is based in Europe, that doesn't necessarily mean we see things so very differently from our counterparts in other regions. Increasingly, multinational companies like ours face the same conditions, challenges, and opportunities wherever they operate, as globalization profoundly reshapes today's world.

2003 - Morris Chang
Lifting Asia's Economic Plateau - A Slow But Necessary Path to Self-Renewal Begins in China
Almost everywhere in Asia, economic growth has slowed down perceptibly in recent years. Japan is in its second decade of stagnation and, even with the recent optimism about recovery, expects to eke out only a modest growth in 2003. The "four little dragons" of the 1980s and early '90s-Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea-have not done much better since the Asia financial crisis of 1997-98. Singapore, which was accustomed to 8 percent or higher growth every year before 1998, has had two negative growth years since then (1998 and 2001) and appears to be heading into another one this year. Hong Kong experienced -5 percent growth in 1998 and has averaged about 4 percent growth since then-lackluster compared to its record before 1998. Taiwan has gone from 6-8 percent annual growth in the decade before 1998 to an average of 3-4 percent since then. South Korea, after recovering from a 6.7 percent contraction in 1998, has performed erratically, and in fact experienced sequential quarter-to-quarter contraction in the first half of 2003. The other smaller economies in South Asia have behaved more or less similarly to the four little dragons.

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2002 - Dale W. Jorgenson
The Promise of Growth in the Information Age
Innovations in both communications transmission gear and software have been undervalued because constant performance price indexes have not been developed to capture the enormous gains in capability and, thus, productivity that these innovations bring. These huge gaps in our ability to measure technological change challenge our ability to understand its impact on economic growth. Indeed, improved IT price data are essential for understanding the links between semiconductor technology and the growth of the U.S. economy. It would be premature to extrapolate the recent acceleration in productivity growth into the indefinite future, since this depends on sustaining the rapid rate of technological progress that drives the current two-year product cycle for semiconductors. Doubts about both technological momentum and growth in employment mean that the United States is unlikely to find its way back to the resurgent economic growth of 1995-2000 anytime soon. Given the current IT information gap, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity for economic policy makers.
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For an expanded version of this essay - including data analysis, charts and tables, and sources - click here.

2001 - Jim Collins
The Misguided Mix-Up of Celebrity and Leadership
Our culture has fallen in love with the idea of the celebrity CEO. These charismatic egotists grace the covers of major magazines because they are much more interesting to write and read about. This fuels the mistaken belief that a high-profile, larger-than-life leader is required to make a company great. But empirical evidence shows that, more often than not, such leaders contribute to the continued mediocrity, or even demise, of their companies. Meanwhile, truly great companies - those with cumulative stock returns at least three times better than the general stock market over 15 years - are more often headed by CEOs who lead with a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. Not that such leaders have no ego or self-interest. They are incredibly ambitious. But their ambition - which they pursue with almost stoic resolve - is first and foremost for the institution and its greatness, not for themselves.
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2000 - Paul A. Volcker
The Exchange Rate System Needs a New Look
The exchange rate market appears increasingly dominated by financial flows responding to strong herd behavior. Smaller, less diversified economies pay a higher price for this - and for the correspondingly huge rate swings we now see - than the United States, Europe, and Japan. Although, policywise, these bigger players have acted with benign neglect toward this state of affairs, even Europe - witness the euro - was able to carry this policy only so far. But regional arrangements like the euro are only a half-way house for addressing the larger forces of globalization that make exchange rate instability unsustainable. What we need is international reform leading to a common world currency.
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1999 - Peter F. Drucker
The Real Meaning of the Merger Boom
What is going on in business is not a merger boom, but a massive restructuring. Indeed, the real boom has been in alliances of all kinds - partnerships, cooperative agreements, and joint ventures often sealed with just a handshake and not subject to traditional reporting requirements. This shift in the structural model of business - from control to mutual trust - is creating a different economy, but it also requires a different notion of leadership. Making the new structures work is more difficult. But where they do work, the results are superior.
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