The Corporate Executive Board Company

Paul Monahan is CEO of Hydric and Struggles, the executive search and leadership advisory firm.

Before that, he was chairman and CEO of CEB, which he built into the advisor to the Fortune 500 before Gardner bought it in 2017.

He grew up working his family's traveling carnival that taught him there's no such thing as a business that doesn't depend on people.

In this episode, we talk with him about why the CEO job keeps getting more complicated and the emerging capabilities needed around the top table.

You probably can't tell from my accent because I'm actually from the, grew up in the DC area, Northern Virginia.

way back in the day uh and um yeah the last 20 years or so um i've been really studying um in the best way possible i could find the art and science of sales in a number of different roles been a sales leader a sales person for many years and founder of insight revenue about 20 years ago i joined a company called corporate executive board also found in the dc area And it really looked at deep science and best practices around all functional topics.

But I was particularly brought in to help look at the sales side and also how you build professional services to implement on the back of research.

And that led to the challenger sale, which many people know and practice we built doing that.

How do you drive high performance the way customers are buying today? And how do you manage teams to greater effect in this industry? Era of constant change.

And I'm sure we'll dive into that.

Allison also worked with us together back at Corporate Executive Board and has done some amazing things in the sales world.

So we thought she'd be a perfect guest.

So I stopped and was looking for something else to do.

I had a college roommate who had started at this company, Corporate Executive Board, or CEB.

Now, CEB doesn't exist anymore.

They were acquired by Gartner.

But essentially she called me and said, "Hey, this is a really smart group of people, not super clear what we're selling, but I know there's a lot of smart people and fun people selling it.

Right now we're gonna say the chief evangelist job is the top.

You had to take those steps across your career in order to get to where you are today.

So after you're an account manager, you had a number of other positions at CEB and also Challenger through- throughout time.

Why do businesses not do that? It doesn't make sense, Becky.

CEB did this research 20 years ago and we're still promoting high-performing individual contributors where sales manager, their number is tied to that salesperson's number.

And so there's a vested interest.

And I think that's where a lot of sales managers do and tell rather than coach.

Why do businesses not do that? It doesn't make sense, Becky.

Yeah.

CEB did this research 20 years ago and we're still promoting high-performing individual contributors.

I think some of it is just a numbers.

You don't even know what that means.

But when I started, I, I worked at a company called Corporate Executive Board.

People-- Some people know CEB from the book Challenger Sale from Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon.

It's kind of a famous book.