Strategy Implementation

Kurt Verweire is Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Partner at Vlerick Business School, Belgium.

The biggest challenge to success in the ever more competitive environment companies face is strategy execution. Kurt Verweire's very readable and comprehensive book provides important insights into the factors that undermine strategy execution and offers ways to overcome them. A must read for senior executives.Michael Beer, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School & Chairman, TruePointFor managers wondering what to do to take their competitive strategy to the next level, this book is right on the mark. By focusing on the big leadership challenges of strategy execution, Verweire takes us well beyond established strategy concepts with astute insights and practice-tested frameworks that emphasize organization-wide alignment and commitment as key levers of marketplace advantage. Very incisive, very timely.Fred Wiersema, Customer Strategist, Chair of the B2B Leadership Board, Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State, USA, and co-author of the topselling 'The Discipline of Market Leaders'.Verweire describes clearly the challenges that managers must tackle to turn strategy into performance. He builds on the value disciplines – operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership – to add new insights and has integrated frameworks on strategy formulation, alignment and commitment. Anyone who is interested in deploying strategy effectively should read this book! Michael Treacy, Co-Author, The Discipline of Market Leaders, USATaking a simple savings bank model and changing the way customers think about their money was like baking a soufflé at high altitudes. Having all the right ingredients didn't compensate for the atmospheric forces that needed to be overcome for success. Strategy implementation takes commitment to the vision, the chemistry of a team, the indulgence of time, and a heavy dose of Pixie Dust for the market to adapt. The Strategy-Alignment-Commitment model describes well what are the necessary ingredients to make this happen.Arkadi Kuhlmann, Founder and former CEO of ING Direct Canada and USA and founder of ZenbanxStrategy implementation is one of the most important challenges that a company faces today. Unfortunately, there are few comprehensive frameworks and books that explain what the strategy implementation challenge entails and how to deal with it. This book is an exception to the rule. It provides the reader with some new insights how to turn strategy into results and how to commit the entire organization on the implementation journey.Hans Bourlon, Co-founder and co-CEO of Studio 100Integrating and analysing the best and most practical business strategy literature, Strategy Implementation offers a clear framework that has been successfully used with the many management teams the author has worked with. The result is a book that is equally comprehensive as an accompaniment to a business strategy course, as it is practical for executives that want to diagnose their firms’ alignment and commitment around their chosen strategy. This book puts the frameworks, tools and illustration in your hands.Philippe Haspeslagh, Dean, Vlerick Business School, Belgium

• Part 1: Strategy Formulation and Implementation 1. The Challenge of Strategy and Implementation 2. Formulating a Winning Strategy 3. Implementing a Winning Strategy through Strategic Allignment 4. Implementing a Winning Strategy Through Commitment Part 2: Strategy and Implementation for the Product Leadership Organization 5. What Does It Mean to be a Product Leader? 6. What Does it Take to be a Product Leader? 7. Strategy Implementation in Practice Part 3: Strategy and Implementation for Customer Intimacy Organziations 8. What Does it Mean to be Customer Intimate? 9. What Does it Take to be Customer Intimate? 10. Strategy Implementation in Practice : Studio 100 Part 4: Strategy and Implementation for Operational Excellence Firms 11. What Does it Mean to be Operationally Excellent? 12. What Does it Take to be Operationally Excellent? 13. Strategy Implementation in Practice: ING Direct USA