Harvard Business Publishing

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly. Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met: the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy; the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or the innovation is part of an ongoing program of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time.... Keep Reading »

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly. Innovation comes in many flavors: operational innovation, product innovation, strategy innovation, and, of course, management innovation. Each genre makes its own contribution to success, but if we were to array these various forms of innovation in a hierarchy, where higher tiers denote higher levels of value creation and competitive defensibility, management innovation would come out on top. Understanding why this is so is an important step in building your company’s commitment to management innovation, so let’s work our way up from the bottom.... Keep Reading »

Excerpted from "The Future of Management," by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen. Look for new excerpts weekly. For our purposes, management innovation is anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organizational forms, and, by so doing, advances organizational goals. Put simply, management innovation changes the way managers do what they do, and does so in a way that enhances organizational performance. So what is it that managers do?... Keep Reading »