Making Innovation Everyone's Job

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen.

In a world where strategy life cycles are shrinking, innovation is the only way a company can renew its lease on success. It’s also the only way it can survive in a world of bare-knuckle competition.

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Help Reinvent Management for the 21st Century

The first rule of blog-writing is this: keep it current. So apologies. I haven’t posted anything in a few months because I’ve been working flat out to pull together a conference that will focus on the challenge of inventing the future of management. This invitation-only event will take place in Half Moon Bay, California on the 29th and 30th of May, and the attendees will include . . .

Academic heavyweight like Henry Mintzberg (McGill), Peter Senge, (MIT) Chris Argyris (Harvard), C.K. Prahalad (Michigan), Tom Malone (MIT), Jeffery Pfeffer (Stanford), and Linda Hill (Harvard).

Big thinkers like James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds), Eric Beinhocker (The Origins of Wealth), Lowell Bryan (Mobilizing Minds), Steven Weber (The Success of Open Source) and David Wolfe (Firms of Endearment).

Stars from the venture capital world, including Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) and Leighton Reed, MD (Alloy Ventures).

Distinguished editors and writers like Kevin Kelly (former editor of Wired) and Tom Stewart (editor of Harvard Business Review).

And some very progressive business leaders, including: Terri Kelly (CEO, W.L. Gore), John Mackey (CEO, Whole Foods), Tim Brown (CEO, IDEO), VineetNayar (CEO, HCL Technologies), and Marissa Mayer (Google’s VP for search products).

The animating thought behind the conference is this: What would happen if you invited 35 really smart folks to reinvent management for the 21st century? Hence, the guest list. OK, so nobody’s going to reinvent management over the course of a two day schmooze-fest, but at a minimum, this august group of management thinkers and CEOs ought to be able to come up with a first-cut agenda for tomorrow’s management innovators—don’t you think? Well, we’re going to find out when we get this Ferrari dealership’s worth of intellectual focused on the following four questions:

1. What are the deep-seated impediments, or “design flaws,” that limit the capacity of organizations to adapt (to change without trauma); to innovate (to mobilize the imagination of everyone, every day); and to engage (to create environments that inspire extraordinary contributions).

2. Given these systemic impediments, and the new demands that will confront organizations in the years ahead, what should be the agenda for 21st century management innovators? That is, what are the “moonshot challenges” that must be addressed if we are to create organizations that are truly fit for the future?

3. Can we imagine, even in outline form, some potential solutions to these challenges, and if so, what sorts of experiments might be useful in helping us to test these ideas in real world settings?

4. More generally, what could be done to help accelerate the evolution of management in the years to come, that is, what is it that limits the pace of management innovation and how might these limits by overcome?

Of course, a few dozen brainiacs are no substitute for a “crowd” of unconventional and inspired thinkers. So, if YOU have a view on any or all of these questions, I and my colleagues at the MLab would like to hear from you. (You can post a comment below.) We’ll weave your ideas into the conversations we’ll be having in Half Moon Bay—so you let us know what you think, and be sure to append your name to your comment, so we can give credit where credit’s due.

And in a few weeks I’ll come back and tell you what happened when we gave the experts a couple of days to imagine the future of management.

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How to Build the Processes That Support Innovation

Would-be innovators are often frustrated by the legacy management processes their companies built to ensure discipline, alignment, and conformance, rather than to provide support for innovation and experimentation.

Your challenge with this tool is to identify specific things that could be done to make your company’s management processes and practices catalysts for innovation, rather than impediments to new thinking.

Click here to download the tool and instructions

Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School; cofounder of Strategos, an international consulting company; and director of the Management Innovation Lab. He is the author of Leading the Revolution and coauthor of Competing for the Future, two landmark books that have appeared on every management best seller list. He has also written numerous articles for Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and many other business publications. Hamel lives in Northern California. For more, you can also visit garyhamel.com.