In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a classic but fictional town in Minnesota, “all the children are above average.” When it comes to growth in a stagnating global economy, clearly most corporate executives tend to see their own prospects in a similar way. In a recent Accenture study involving 1000 CFOs and CMOs across eight industries and a dozen countries in developed and emerging markets, 85 percent of executives expected their companies to grow at a rate equal to or significantly greater than global growth forecasts.

Digging deeper provides a few more clues as to how executives expect to achieve this growth despite an apparently flagging market. Usually in a period where companies are forecasting growth, pricing power is a critical component. Yet over two thirds of respondents indicated they expect to maintain or further drop pricing, leaving them unable to pass rising commodity costs along to their customers; this trend is heightened when we exclude the energy industry (where, by its nature, input costs are passed directly to the consumer).