From megatrends to strategy execution (#1) -intro

In an ideal business world, determining your long-term strategy should start with a thorough assessment of the impact of megatrends on your business –and would not only take into account the trends that have an obvious, direct impact on your industry, but others as well that might have indirect effects (on your customers or your ecosystem for instance).

Based on the ideas and strategic directions obtained from the exercise, the second step would look at how to adapt and change processes in order to respond to the challenges and reap the benefits of the future, using business model innovation techniques for instance.

However, a third and often forgotten discipline is equally important to make strategy work: strategy execution!

I must admit I’m not an expert in this field. But I was fortunate enough to have a couple of discussions with an expert, Jeroen De Flander, whose book ‘Strategy Execution Heroes: Business Strategy Implementation and Strategic Management Demystified - A Practical Performance Management Guidebook for the Successful Leader’ stroke me both for its practical usability (it’s loaded with concrete tips on strategy execution) and its breadth (nothing is omitted, it even goes down to the presentation style of the CEO).

Jeroen agreed to share his top strategy execution advice on my blog, so in the next 3 Fridays he will be posting on this blog, covering following topics:

• 14 striking strategy execution figures (28/10) 
• 9 reasons why strategy execution fails (4/11) 
• 8 dynamics for strategy review (11/11) 

So watch this space to get some crucial advice on strategy execution! (or, if you can’t wait, visit Jeroen’s blog archive full of tips and tricks on strategy execution).