Words matter. These are the best Gary Hamel Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
I’m a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business.
In most languages, ‘control’ is the first synonym for the word ‘manage.’ Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control, one must first constrain.
Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.
In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record – it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart.
It doesn’t matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is – what matters is its relative ‘share of customer value’ in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
If organized religion has become less relevant, it’s not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs – it’s because they’ve held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.
All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past – by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.
Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.
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.
Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.
I don’t know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.
In a democracy, you don’t need anyone’s permission to form a new political party, publish a politically charged article, or organize a ‘tea party.’ And in open markets, individuals are free to buy and invest as they see fit.
Obviously, you don’t have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.
What’s true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That’s why the most resilient things in our world – biological life, stock markets, the Internet – are loosely organized.
To create an organization that’s adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to ‘waste’ time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.
A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn’t unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.
Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.
You can’t build an adaptable organization without adaptable people – and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.
At the pinnacle of great design are products so gorgeous and lust-worthy that you want to lick them: a Porsche 911, Samsung’s Luxia TV, an Eames lounge chair or anything by Loro Piana.
Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.
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.
As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs.
It’s not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it’s that they no longer believe society’s most powerful institutions are acting in their interests.
