The Strategy of Execution: A Five-Step Guide for Turning Vision into Action

Businesses spend a combined total of $47 billion annually on strategy consulting. Approximately 90 percent of strategic change initiatives fail to deliver the intended results.

Something isn't adding up.

As companies all over the world concentrate on revisiting, revising, and remaking their strategies, they forget the next step: making sure the strategy happens. So it turns out that billions of dollars are spent on brilliant ideas--but not brilliant results.

In this groundbreaking book, business strategy experts Liz Mellon and Simon Carter provide a solution: THE STRATEGY OF EXECUTION. The authors break down the process of ensuring that your new strategy translates into measurable profits and growth into five fundamental and profoundly important steps:

• MOBILIZE THE VILLAGE: Get your senior executives to embrace the new strategy and actively engage with it.
• GATHER THE ELDERS: Build a small team of the very highest figures in the corporation to lead strategic change.
• POWER UP FEELING: Don't overthink it; trust your instincts as much as your intellect.
• ENERGIZE PEOPLE: Create a culture of communication, ownership, and follow-through of strategic objectives.
• BUILD ENDURANCE: Drive individual and organizational resilience to play the long game and hardwire change throughout systems and organizational structures to maintain momentum.

In the final chapter, the authors illustrate their process in action through a detailed case study of BPB PLC--a century-old building material company that applied these five steps to make extraordinary strategic change happen.

You can lead positive change in your company. A strategy is just words on paper until it's executed with care and smarts. Use The Strategy of Execution as a blueprint for long-term business success.

There are a lot of smart people coming up with innovative business strategies today. Very few of them, however, are executing them. The gap between strategy and execution has never been wider. The Strategy of Execution provides a practical approach to the work that must be done after a business strategy is agreed upon.

About the Authors

DR. LIZ MELLON has spent the last 25 years designing, developing, and delivering leadership development programs, initially as a professor at London Business School and currently as executive director at Duke CE, the world's leading executive education provider. The world's most influential global ranking of management thought leaders, Thinkers50, has listed Mellon on its "Guru Radar."

SIMON CARTER, former CEO of Baxi Heating UK, was featured by the BBC for his work in leading corporate transformation during a period of challenging union dominance in the 1990s. Since stepping down as chairman, Carter has been an advisor to FTSE companies all over the world.