Harvard Business Publishing

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,... Keep Reading »

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... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

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.... Keep Reading »

A few months back I sat down for a conversation with one of the world’s most distinguished organizational theorists, an emeritus professor who has published more articles in A-list journals than I’ve had hot breakfasts. As we sipped our coffees and peered out into the trees that surround my home office, I shared my dreams for the future of management. Surely, I argued, there must be a way of making big companies more resilient—of helping them to become as nimble as they are efficient.... Keep Reading »

It’s hard to imagine how something that has changed so little over the past few decades—in this case, the hierarchical, bureaucratic management system that governs life in large organizations—might change dramatically in the years to come. Nevertheless, a while back my friend Tom Stewart, the editor of Harvard Business Review, and I posted the following question online: Looking twenty years out into the future, what one characteristic—principle, practice, or structural feature—of the “modern” industrial organization will appear to be the most antiquated or anachronistic? Over the course of a few weeks, we received more than one hundred responses from managers around the world.... Keep Reading »