Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly.

If management innovation has been mostly incremental in recent years, it may be due to a lack of daring in the choice of problems to tackle. Ask yourself, has your company ever taken on a management challenge that was truly unprecedented, where you couldn’t rely on another company’s experience as a guide? General Electric has.

In 2006, chairman Jeff Immelt set his colleagues the goal of growing GE’s top line at twice the rate of global GDP growth—net of acquisitions. No company of GE’s size has ever managed to sustain this sort of growth, yet that didn’t deter Immelt from taking on the challenge. There’s no guarantee that GE will achieve its growth goals, but if it fails, it won’t be for a lack of moxie

While big problems don’t always yield big advances, small ones never do. As the Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Sir Peter Medawar once put it: “Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers.” So you’re going to need to think big.

If you are worried about biting off more than you can chew, keep two things in mind. First, you don’t always have to take big risks to solve big problems. Innovation is usually an iterative process where solutions emerge through trial and error. In the early years of the U.S. space program, scientists sent more than ten monkeys into space before strapping a human being to a rocket. You don’t have to take a big gamble to test out a bold new management idea.

Second, if the problem is big enough, progress of any sort will be valuable, even if you never find a “solution.” I once heard former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz draw a distinction between “problems you can solve” and “problems you can only work at.” As a seasoned diplomat, Shultz knows that some problems, like ethnic strife, global poverty, and terrorism, defy once-and-for-all solutions. Yet he also understands that when you’re up against problems of this scale and significance, even modest advances can yield big dividends. It may turn out that many of the 21st century’s most perplexing management problems are ones we can only work at—they will resist attempts at a quick fix, but will reward persistent, imaginative effort.

It takes ingenuity, pluck, and perseverance to solve big problems. These human qualities are most abundant when the problem to be addressed is not only weighty but soul-stirring as well. As a devout Quaker, Frederick Taylor’s single-minded devotion to efficiency stemmed from a conviction that it was iniquitous to waste even an hour of human labor when a task could be redesigned to be performed more efficiently. That Taylor could spend days studying the most productive ways to shovel coal was evidence not only of an obsessive mind, but of a missionary zeal for multiplying the value of human effort. This passion shines through in the introduction to his 1911 opus, Principles of Scientific Management: “We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.”

Given Taylor’s singularly influential role in the history of management, we would do well to heed his example: to maximize the chances for precedent-breaking management innovation, devote yourself to a problem that is consequential and inspiring, essential and laudable.

If you don’t already have such a challenge in mind, here are a few leading questions that will help you focus your search:

• First, what are the new challenges the future has in store for your company? What are the emerging discontinuities that will stretch its management processes and practices to the breaking point? What’s the “tomorrow problem” that you need to start working on right now?

• Second, what are the tough balancing acts your company never seems to get right? Is there a critical trade-off where one side always seems to prevail at the expense of the other? What’s the frustrating “either/or” you’d like to turn into an “and”?

• Third, what are the biggest gaps between rhetoric and reality in your company? What are the values it has the hardest time living up to, or finds the most difficult to institutionalize? What’s the espoused ideal you’d like to turn into an embedded capability?

• Finally, what are you indignant about? What are the frustrating incompetencies that plague your company and other organizations like it? What’s the “can’t do” that needs to become a “can do”?

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MORE ON MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION:
The Future of Management (Hardcover)
Staying Ahead of Your Competition (HBR Article Collection)
Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation (Hardcover)
The Why, What, and How of Management Innovation (HBR Article)