Gary hamel quotes

Win small, win early, win often.

Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.

Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.

An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.

Truth be told, there are lots of companies that provide exemplary phone support. DirecTV, Virgin America and Apple are a few that regularly exceed my expectations.

In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.

What's true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That's why the most resilient things in our world - biological life, stock markets, the Internet - are loosely organized.

One way of building private foresight out of public data is looking where others aren't ... if you want to see the future, go to an industry confab and get the list of what was talked about. Then ask, "What did people never talk about?" That's where you're going to find opportunity.

The best innovations - both socially and economically - come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love. These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing. And that’s why the heart of innovation is a desire to re-enchant the world.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don't do paradox very well.** (emphasis by author) [2002] p.25f

Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

Never before has the gap between what we can imagine and what we can accomplish been smaller.

When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating.

Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.

Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink. The same goes for strategies. How many organizations carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.

Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who's forging a bullet with your company's name on it. You've got one option now - to shoot first. You've got to out innovate the innovators.

An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.

In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

Competition for the future is competition to create and dominate emerging opportunities-to stake out new competitive space. Creating the future is more challenging than playing catch up, in that you have to create your own roadmap.

There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.

Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.

To be embraced, a change effort must be socially constructed in a process that gives everyone the right to set priorities, diagnose barriers, and generate options.

We like to believe we can break strategy down to Five Forces or Seven Ss. But you can't. Strategy is extraordinarily emotional and demanding.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.

Our biggest challenge is how to create a self-renewing company.

The value of your network is the square of the number of people in it.

In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.

Strategy is, above all else, the search for above average returns.

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.

In an increasingly non-linear economy, incremental change is not enough-you have to build a capacity for strategy innovation, one that increases your ability to recognize new opportunities.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

Obviously, you don't have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.

For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.

It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.

Are we changing as fast as the world around us?

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

You can't use an old map to see a new land.

One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.

The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.

The problem with the future is that it is different, if you are unable to think differently, the future will always arrive as a surprise.

We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.

Alan Kay's famous aphorism is that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens.

All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.

We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.

The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.

The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.

Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.

You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.

Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

I don't know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history.

Companies do not do new things because they understand it but because they feel it.

In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight - insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.

In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record - it's easy to discover who's in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don't appear on any organization chart.

I'm not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.

I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partly responsible for Silicon Valley's feverish, get-it-done-yesterday work norms.

Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.

Organizational structures of today demand too much from a few, and not much at all from everyone else.

A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.

The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.

Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company's name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can't dodge the bullet – you're going to have to shoot first. You're going to have to out-innovate the innovators.

Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.

Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied.

Any company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it.

Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.

people are all there is to an organization

Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns.

Only stupid questions create wealth.

Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.

There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Most companies don't have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.

Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.

What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination

The opportunities for future growth are everywhere. Seeing the future has nothing to do with speculating about what might happen. Rather, you must understand the revolutionary potential of what is already happening.

The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.

Your organization can start tweeting, but that wont change its DNA.

During the ten years I lived in the U.K., I frequently attended an Anglican church just outside of London. I enjoyed the energetic singing and the thoughtful homilies. And yet, I found it easy to be a pew warmer, a consumer, a back row critic.

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business.