Executive Intelligence

In today's complex business climate, executives need better insight into potential new opportunities and emerging risks to stay ahead of their competition. They also need to continually refresh that learning, both individually and organizationally.

While most conferences and executive development programs focus on industry trends or honing management and operational skills, GBN's executive intelligence offerings add a third dimension: insight into the trajectory and interaction of the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces shaping the business environment. Specifically, we help your senior executives and high-potential leaders broaden and deepen their contextual awareness in order to challenge their assumptions, spot trends earlier, and stimulate more creative thinking about the future of their business. At the same time, we transfer the capability required to support ongoing scenario thinking.

Drawing upon our world class expertise in futures research, scenario planning, and experiential learning, GBN offers a range of interactive workshops and engagements that enable your organization and its leaders to become more aware of — and adapt to — contextual change. GBN works with you to:

  • Employ rapid-fire scenaric thinking to explore and prioritize the critical uncertainties that will most affect your industry and your strategy
  • Create a learning agenda to broaden and deepen your organization's understanding of these issues and how to take advantage of (or mitigate against) them
  • Undertake an Official Futures Analysis to render visible the hidden strategic assumptions and conventional wisdom beliefs that influence the decision-making of most players in your industry or company
  • Expand your awareness through a customized Learning Journey, which takes executives out of the office, exposing them to the forces that might shape the future — or are already shaping the present in ways that are invisible to most of us
  • Participate in our interactive Global Trends Workshop Series, in which your executives explore trends — and implications — that are not yet on management's radar, such as radical urbanization, the millennial generation, the impacts of climate change, the future of Africa, and converging technologies
  • Build internal capacity through our onsite or public scenarios training courses in order to embed and apply scenaric thinking to a broad set of issues, challenges, and choices
  • Engage provocative, interdisciplinary thinkers from both the GBN practice and the GBN Network to help you understand the emerging issues and trends that may affect your business in surprising ways
  • Establish and tap an advisory network of external thought leaders to contribute, vet, and challenge your new ideas on an ongoing basis

For more information on GBN's executive intelligence offerings, please contact information at gbn dot com or click here.

Related Articles

Barbara Bylenga
GBN in Conversation with Barbara Bylenga—president of Outlaw Consulting, a San Francisco market research firm specializing in "coolhunting" and trendspotting—about the unburdened attitude of Gen Y women.
with Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger
GBN in Conversation with Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger—journalists, researchers, and authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility—on reframing and upframing the political dialogue in America.
with Gregg Zachary
GBN in Conversation with The Wall Street Journal's Gregg Zachary on “What Bono doesn't tell you about Africa”—a look at the “good stories” we seldom hear and why Africa is poised to surprise us all.
Chip Conley
GBN in Conversation with Chip Conley—founder of Joie de Vivre and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow—on radical new models of organization and leadership.
Adam Kahane
GBN in Conversation with Adam Kahane, Cofounder of Reos Partners and renowned facilitator of multi-stakeholder social change efforts on "Co-Creating New Social Realities: Harnessing both Power and Love"
Peter Schwartz and Nancy Murphy
Despite the uncertainties surrounding climate change, businesses can and must act now; this summary from a June GBN/Monitor Group workshop suggests how to make climate change a competitive and adaptive advantage.
Eamonn Kelly and Nancy Murphy
Report of a GBN meeting on whether China will be a global rule maker or rule taker in the decade ahead, and how either—or both—roles might unfold?
Lawrence Wilkinson and Jenny Johnston
Report of a GBN meeting on the drivers and themes that are shaping the environment in which branding will unfold, and the tools and approaches to branding and brands that might prevail in the future.
Peter Schwartz
Visionary perspectives on the future, culminating in an optimistic scenario. Commissioned by the SCI FI Channel, with a foreward by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Chris Ertel and Erik Smith
Report of a GBN meeting examining global demographic trends and their potential implications for the future.
Peter Schwartz, Jenny Johnston
GBN chairman Peter Schwartz, dozens of corporate leaders, and more than 20 big thinkers in the GBN Network gathered to explore the key questions that loom over our future and will shape the next 50 years.
Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall
A “worse case” scenario examining the possible impact of significant climate change on U.S. national security.
Eamonn Kelly
Report of a GBN meeting on the changes facing executive development in light of demographic shifts, the war for talent, and new organizational forms and demands.
Brian Sager
Report of a GBN Learning Journey exploring “biofutures”-- emerging developments in biotechnology and their convergence with other technologies.
Nils Gilman, Peter Schwartz, Doug Randall
This GBN white paper offers an alternative analytic approach to understanding climate change disruptions, and a new way to both anticipate and imagine potential impacts of climate change.
AnnaLee Saxenian
A noted economist examines how networks and diasporas are shaping the global economy and turning brain drain into “brain circulation.”
with Chip Heath
GBN in Conversation with Stanford professor Chip Heath on "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die"
Eamonn Kelly
A Flash animation narrated by former GBN President Eamonn Kelly, exploring 10 trends that are creating, even transforming, our future.