Voices » HBR Voices » Gary Hamel » Be Bold in Your Innovation
8:26 AM Sunday October 28, 2007
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.
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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.
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Comments
Dear Prof. Hamel,
The traditional organization focuses on good performance at the individual as well as the group / team level. It is common knowledge that the functional division of organizations leads to an inherent conflict. The first challenge therefore is: how does one develop a synergistic culture / environment where people are willing to forget their egos and concentrate on the big picture all the time? Compounding this challenge is the hypercompetitive environment prevalent in most industries. Even to stay where you are, you need to run. If you wish to get ahead of others, everyone needs to sprint. How do you achieve this? Shared vision / mission are fine as concepts but given the diversity of today's workplace, how does one ensure that the vision is shared across the organization?
The second challenge is to balance the expectations of different stakeholders. Do customer satisfaction and customer delight go hand-in-hand with maximizing shareholder wealth? And how does one address the aspirations of people (if one wants to mitigate attrition), suppliers (long-term relationships), society (CSR), and government (ethical practices)? More often than not, shareholder value or wealth appears to get the better of other objectives. How does one balance the apparently disparate claims?
The largest gap between rhetoric and reality appears to be in the realm of integrity. One look at the claims made by providers of anything from personal care products to high-technology products is enough to expose this chasm. Bombarded as we are with comparitive advertising, can we still say that honesty is the best policy?
The most frustrating aspect of life today in any organization or profession is the laid-back attitude that one comes across - we are not change agents; we cannot transform society; when every other organization is polluting the environment, why should we go green?; in the long-term, we are all dead, what matters is the quarterly result... the list is endless.
Pardon me; in keeping with the spirit of this discussion, I have outlined a few generic concerns instead of anything specific to
one organization. It would be great to have your wisdom on the above-mentioned dilemmas.
Warm regards
- Posted by B V Krishnamurthy
October 30, 2007 1:09 AM