Preparing for Progress

Whether it’s public or private sector, strategic and policy decisions are the nuts and bolts of creating direction and making progress. Such decisions must be clear, tangible and detailed enough to focus, accelerate and smooth out subsequent levels of operational decision-making.

This book provides a profound analysis of the qualities which should characterise strategic and policy decision processes. It also explains why these processes sometimes don’t deliver as expected. This enlightening, thought-provoking work will take you beyond process models based on boxes and arrows, and enable you to design workflows centred on creativity and learning.

The author illustrates numerous real-life cases, relating processes to outcomes and vice-versa. Using clear, concise language and informative graphs and diagrams, he provides informative yet accessible information for readers from all career paths.

Göran Pagels-Fick has been a researcher, a business developer and a private sector strategist. His career has included roles in research policy for a national academy and government innovation agency and as a research policy lobbyist in Brussels. His work has also involved him in foresight programmes across various European and Asian countries.

Whatever your field, Preparing for Progress will prove a truly interesting, stimulating and valuable guide.

Göran Pagels-Fick has a broad-facetted professional background in the areas of business strategy, research policy, decision sciences and business development. He worked with research policy in the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and also initiated the “Decision support systems” research program at IIASA in Austria. Göran managed program management and advanced business applications within Philips Financial Business Systems. Later Göran joined Ericsson Telecom as director Business Intelligence (Competitive intelligence). This included extensive international networking in competitive intelligence as a basis for strategy development. He also became director for the Strategic Position unit and director at Ericsson European Affairs in Brussels where he participated in several EU-centred industrial bodies such as EIRMA (European Industrial Research Management Association) and EICTA (now DigitalEurope). Göran later led the foresight activities at the Swedish Innovation Authority, Vinnova and provided methodological support for the two Swedish National Foresights. He was deeply involved in the use of foresight as a tool to develop national priorities in public research financing and developed an international network within this area.

Göran has published a book in Swedish on “Business Intelligence” (in the sense of Competitive Intelligence) and he is now a frequent lecturer at several universities. Mr Pagels-Fick runs his own consultancy firm BUSAD.

He holds an MSc in engineering physics from Lund Institute of Technology.