Gary Hamel on Business Strategy & Innovation
Professor Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is…
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Professor Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is…
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There are no such thing as low-skilled jobs, there are only low-opportunity jobs where people are treated as commodities. We don't train them.. we don't give them autonomy… we don't give them any financial upside… yet when they fail to be creative, and fail to do more than the job requires, we say they just aren't very clever or capable…. Guess what; if you put someone in leg-irons, they will have a hard time running.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
We've ended up with organizations that are less capable than the people inside them- which is a little ironic when you think about it. Research shows that 89% of people are happy with the actual tasks of their work yet are frustrated with the work-environment- they are bothered by how they're managed not what they do.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
In large organizations, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and change – they are the gatekeepers – and even if they have the best will in the world, there simply will not be enough of them to deal with the complexity that we have in the environment around us.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
We've had hierarchical and bureaucratic structures as far back as we can go in human history. The Chinese civil service goes back to at least 2000BC and militaries have always been structured as hierarchical. Modern bureaucracy is a mash-up of two ideas. Firstly, the command and control structures which have been core to organized human activity for millennia and secondly, the principles of industrial economics.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. A century ago, information was expensive to acquire and move- bureaucracy was a logical way of bringing information together. The world simply doesn't work like that anymore.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
Organizations fail when leaders fail to write-down their own depreciating intellectual capital, and bureaucracies exaggerate that problem by vesting so much power in so few people. Most change management programs are in-fact catch-up programs.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
Research shows that two-thirds of employees say that new ideas are greeted with skepticism or outright hostility and only one in ten employees genuinely feel they have the freedom to experiment with new methods, products and solutions.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. In bureaucratic structures, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking
Bureaucracy may be humankind's most important innovation. Whether it's scientific innovation, the invention of the steam engine, locomotive, electric-motor, semi-conductor or antibiotics, none of these would have been possible without the understanding of how to work precisely and repeatably at scale; bureaucracy.
— Gary HamelManagement theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking