Gary Hamel Quotes
One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.
The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.
Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who's forging a bullet with your company's name on it. You've got one option now - to shoot first. You've got to out innovate the innovators.
We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.
We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.
There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.
Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.
From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.
Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.
Never before has the gap between what we can imagine and what we can accomplish been smaller.
In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.
You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.
The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.
In an increasingly non-linear economy, incremental change is not enough-you have to build a capacity for strategy innovation, one that increases your ability to recognize new opportunities.
Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.
Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.
An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.
Organizational structures of today demand too much from a few, and not much at all from everyone else.
The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
I'm not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.
The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.
A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.
We like to believe we can break strategy down to Five Forces or Seven Ss. But you can't. Strategy is extraordinarily emotional and demanding.
As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.
This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.
To be embraced, a change effort must be socially constructed in a process that gives everyone the right to set priorities, diagnose barriers, and generate options.
Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.
Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.
In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.
An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.
