Nick Van Heck
Nick (Belgian) advises organizations and their leadership on designing and implementing strategy engagement processes. He founded and acts as director and Chairman of ‘Executive Learning Partnership’, and his work is geared towards unleashing business performance by growing leaders and their organizations.
Nick strongly beliefs in ‘(re-)insourcing the strategic thinking’ in organisations and is passionate about creating the leadership capacity and conviction in creating and enacting an organization’s shared purpose. His motto is : “strategy is too important to be outsourced to consultants; engaging the organisation around the strategic choices and direction is what matters”. He also refers to himself as a ‘behavioural strategist’ : the quality of the strategic conversations drives the clarity of the strategic direction, the capacity to enact the strategy and the commitment and passion to ‘making it happen’.
Nick has been working on numerous strategy and leadership development projects, directed a wide variety of programmes, seminars and workshops across industries in Europe, outside and within business schools like INSEAD (France).
He is a former research and teaching assistant, and visiting faculty member at a variety of business schools around and outside Europe (Solvay Business School, KULeuven, INSEAD, Thunderbird, Fundaçao Dom Cabral, ENPC School of international Management and other). He also published several articles as well as a management book on the leadership challenges in globalizing companies entitled ‘From Local Champions to Global Masters: a strategic perspective on managing internationalization’ (2001) (translated in Dutch and Spanish).
He holds a Master’s degree in Business Economics from KU Leuven (Belgium) and started his career as a research and teaching assistant, in KU Leuven and ULB in Brussels. He also held the position of General Manager, Management Development within Sander & Company (Denmark-United Kingdom).
In addition, Nick has also written several in-depth case studies and articles on the internationalisation and strategic management of companies, published in national and international journals and in the popular press. Two of his cases were awarded Best Case in ‘European Management’ in the 1997 EFMD Case Writing Competition.
Nick is married to Marijke, and is father of a son, Guus (°2000) and a daughter, Luna (°2002) and lives in Belgium. He re-energises through sports, as an active jogger, and a more passive soccer and cycling fan.
