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Business

Kudos for a good research approach

The Conference Board publishes an annual report, CEO Challenge, where hundreds of CEOs globally are quizzed as to their firm’s most pressing concerns.This summer, the Conference Board sent out its surveys but as they began to tabulate responses for their report, the stock market, financial firms, retail and other economic sectors began to retrench significantly.
Written by Brian Sommer, Contributor

The Conference Board publishes an annual report, CEO Challenge, where hundreds of CEOs globally are quizzed as to their firm’s most pressing concerns.

This summer, the Conference Board sent out its surveys but as they began to tabulate responses for their report, the stock market, financial firms, retail and other economic sectors began to retrench significantly. But rather than produce a report that would be out-of-date before it was printed, the Conference Board returned its completed surveys to these executives and gave them a chance to re-score their priorities in light of current developments.

I thought this showed solid judgment and made the report they released over Thanksgiving to be far more market relevant. In fact, the current version even shows how dramatically some factors changed within the last half of this year (e.g., ‘global economic performance’ shot up from 16th to 4th from July/August to October).

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