Harvard Business Review

Preview Gary Hamel's February 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review, Moon Shots for Management.In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century. The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge; distinguished social commentators including Kevin Kelly, James Surowiecki and Shoshana Zuboff; and a number of progressive CEOs, including Terri Kelly from WL Gore, Vineet Nayar from HCL Technologies, and John Mackey from Whole Foods. Before arriving, each of the 35 attendees participated in an hour-long interview. The double-barreled question: What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead; and given this,... > Read More

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... > Read More

There isn’t a sport on the planet that delivers less adrenaline per unit of time than golf. For years, that simple fact kept me off the links. When compared to hurling myself down a black diamond ski run or diving on a wreck, the idea of spending the better part of a day struggling to propel a small round object toward a pint-sized hole, with a device ill-suited to the task, seemed to me both pointless and effete.... > Read More

I don’t read People magazine. It’s not that I’m disinterested in the lives and loves of Paris, Owen, Katie, Tom, Julia, Zac, Nicole, Keith, Jen, Ben, and all the other estimable icons of 21st century haut culture; rather, it’s that I seldom have the time. Friends and colleagues expect me to read the business press, and mostly I do. I am seldom asked, however, to render an opinion on Britney’s over-exposed anatomy or Lindsay’s latest run-in with the law. Nevertheless, the other day I found myself in the gym with 15 minutes of workout remaining and no unread pages left in my Financial Times. So, making sure I wasn’t seen, I slid the November 16 issue of People out of the magazine rack (Jane Seymour—Staying Sexy at 56!) and retreated back to my treadmill. Imagine my shock, when I discovered Nicholas Negroponte’s name on the contents page.... > Read More

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.... > Read More

In Part One of this posting, I argued that the Web has the power to turn management-as-usual inside out. Now let’s consider five of the built-in “design flaws” that limit the performance of traditional bureaucratic organizations, and imagine briefly how the Web might help forward-thinking companies to overcome these deficits.... > Read More

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly. There’s little that can be said with certainty about the future except this: sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent. It will either adapt or falter, reinvent itself or struggle through a painful restructuring. Given the recent performance of industry incumbents around the world, the latter is more likely than the former. Few companies, it seems, are able to change ahead of the curve.... > Read More

Over the last decade, the Internet has dramatically transformed the world of business. It has enabled real-time, globe-spanning supply lines, 24/7 customer service, and the digital distribution of many products and services. It has reduced the costs of coordination across geographic and organizational boundaries, and made it easier for companies to arbitrage wage costs via outsourcing and off-shoring. Just as significantly, the Web has allowed a swarm of upstarts to circumvent long-standing entry barriers in industries as diverse as publishing, music, travel, retailing, and insurance. Whether it’s incumbent companies overhauling old operating models, or newcomers blowing up time-worn business models, the Internet’s impact on business has been pervasive and profound. Yet when it comes to the management models that predominate most companies—the methods and processes used to create strategies, set goals, make critical decisions, allocate resources, and align human effort—the Web’s impact has been comparatively modest.... > Read More

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.... > Read More

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly. Given the power of management innovation to deliver peer-beating performance, it is odd that so few companies possess a well-honed process for continuous management innovation. A stroll through the pages of the world’s leading business magazines confirms the steerage-class status of management innovation.... > Read More