Dr. Gary P. Hamel (born 1954) is an American management expert. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.
The problem with the future is that it is different, if you are unable to think differently, the future will always arrive as a surprise.
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.
There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.
In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.
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.
Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.
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.
Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.
Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.
Companies do not do new things because they understand it but because they feel it.
Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns.
For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.
Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. . . . **Most companies don't do paradox very well. ** (emphasis by author) [2002] p. 25f
Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company's name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can't dodge the bullet – you're going to have to shoot first. You're going to have to out-innovate the innovators.
Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.
What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination
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.
One way of building private foresight out of public data is looking where others aren't. . . if you want to see the future, go to an industry confab and get the list of what was talked about. Then ask, "What did people never talk about?" That's where you're going to find opportunity.