Gary Hamel > Quotes

“... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

[2002] p.46”
― Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life

“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”
― Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life

“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.”
― Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

“**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**
That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.

[first-line bold by author]
[2002] p.23”
― Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life

“Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.”
― Gary Hamel

“If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.”
― Gary Hamel

“There’s no such thing as “sustaining” leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.”
― Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future

“All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.”
― Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future

“In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.”
― Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future

“Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.”
― Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

“An organization’s capacity for renewal should never depend on the capacity of a few senior leaders to learn and unlearn, but in a bureaucracy, it often does.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“It is our bureaucracy-encrusted organizations that are slow witted, not the people inside them.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“There’s no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink’s Drive, the formula hasn’t changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Because competence-building represents more cumulative learning than great leaps of inventiveness, it is difficult to “time compress” competence-building.”
― Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future

“bureaucracy … Grants excessive credence to the views of precedent-bound leaders Discourages rebellious thinking Creates long lags between sense and respond Calcifies organizational structures Blinds silo-dwelling leaders to new opportunities Suboptimizes trade-offs Frustrates the rapid redeployment of resources Discourages risk taking Politicizes decision making Creates long and tortuous approval pathways Misaligns power and leadership capability Caps opportunities for individual contribution Undermines frontline accountability Systematically devalues originality”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Initiative, creativity, and valor can’t be commanded.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Bureaucratic organizations are inertial, incremental, and dispiriting. In a bureaucracy, the power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. When those at the top fall prey to denial, arrogance, and nostalgia, as they often do, the organization falters. That’s why deep change in a bureaucracy is usually belated and convulsive. Bureaucracies are also innovation-phobic. They are congenitally risk averse, and offer few incentives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. In a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high-risk occupation. Worst of all, bureaucracies are soul crushing. Deprived of any real influence, employees disconnect emotionally from work. Initiative, creativity, and daring—requisites for success in the creative economy—often get left at home.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy”
― Gary Hamel

“But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)”
― Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

“the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer is no.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not going to stray from familiar paths.”
― Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future

“Executives often wrongly equate “good value” with “low price.” Instead, “good value” should mean outstanding value for the price.”
― Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

“That’s the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isn’t transformational and what’s transformational doesn’t seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Sadly, senescent companies can’t be euthanized. Instead, semi-comatose, they hang on, closing facilities, killing brands, throttling R&D, shedding staff, merging with lethargic rivals, and lobbying for regulatory help. These are “treadmill companies,” and there are more of them than you think.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Solving new problems and forging new paths—this is what we were born to do. It’s tragic, then, that so many of us work in organizations that are fainthearted and dispiriting. Suggest an unprecedented and audacious idea to your boss and you’re likely to get pummeled with objections: “That doesn’t fit our strategy.” “We don’t have the budget.” “You’ll never get it past legal.” “That’s not our culture.” “It’s impractical.” “There’s a lot of downside.” The problem isn’t your manager, who’s just as hamstrung as you are. The problem is that your organization, like most, is inherently hidebound, repressive, and fainthearted.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“The typical medium- or large-scale organization infantilizes employees, enforces dull conformity, and discourages entrepreneurship; it wedges people into narrow roles, stymies personal growth, and treats human beings as mere resources.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“a capacity for innovation is the hallmark of our species. Each of us was born to create—whether it’s landscaping a garden, writing a blog, composing a photograph, inventing a recipe, developing an app, or starting a business.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Unfortunately, the premise that employees are incapable of exercising judgment tends to be self-validating. First, jobs stripped of interesting cognitive work are unlikely to attract individuals looking to exercise their problem-solving skills. Second, overly scripted jobs give employees little opportunity to disprove the bureaucratic hypothesis that acumen correlates with rank. And third, after living for a few months in a reign of rules, most employees will quit or mentally check out.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them