Gary Hamel Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.

Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

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

Only stupid questions create wealth.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Win small, win early, win often.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Are we changing as fast as the world around us?

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

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

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.

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

**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

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.

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

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