Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Gary Hamel - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

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.

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

Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.

people are all there is to an organization

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

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

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.

Are we changing as fast as the world around us?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Only stupid questions create wealth.

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.

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

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.

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.

Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.

Win small, win early, win often.

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

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

We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

**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

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

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

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