Product Description

For organizations like GE, Procter & Gamble, and Visa, management innovation is the secret to success. But what is management innovation, and how does it
happen? What activities and ways of thinking do such companies cultivate that encourage truly unique management ideas to be born and to flourish? And
how can other companies learn to become management innovators? In, The Future of Management, strategy and innovation expert Gary Hamel addresses
these crucial questions. Management innovation delivers a strong and lasting advantage to the innovating company and can produce a major shift in
industry leadership.

In his new audiobook, Hamel outlines the four crucial components necessary to create an innovation in management practice: a big problem that demands fresh thinking, creative principles, or paradigms that can reveal new approaches; an evaluation of the conventions that constrain novel thinking; and examples and analogies that help redefine what can be done. He also offers practical advice and poses critical questions to help companies explore their existing management processes and create opportunities to reinvent them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #390868 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
Though this authoritative examination of today's static corporate management systems reads like a business school treatise, it isn't the same-old thing. Hamel, a well-known business thinker and author (Leading the Revolution), advocates that dogma be rooted out and a new future be imagined and invented. To aid managers and leaders on this mission, Hamel offers case studies and measured analysis of management innovators like Google and W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), then lists lessons that can be drawn from them. He doesn't gloss over how difficult it will be to reinvent management, comparing the new and needed shift in thinking to Darwin's abandoning creationist traditions and physicists who had to look beyond Newton's clockwork laws to discover quantum mechanics. But the steps needed to make such a profound shift aren't clearly outlined here either. The book serves primarily as an invitation to shed age-old systems and processes and think differently. There's little humor and few punchy catchphrases—the book has less sparkle than Jeffrey Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking?—but its content will likely appeal to managers accustomed to b-school textbooks and tired of gimmicky business evangelism. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Gary Hamel has been on the faculty of the LondonBusinessSchool since 1983, where he is currently Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management. He is also the founder of Strategos, a consulting company that has trained tens of thousands of individuals around the world.

Hamel received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has held faculty appointments at the U. of M. and HarvardBusinessSchool. He is a fellow of the World Economic Forum and serves on the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal. Hamel lives in Northern California.

Customer Reviews

Truly the Future - A must of all leaders
I read a great book called, The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.

I found the book to be very well written. I read a lot of business books and many of them are not that well written; however, I still like the books if they are well laid out and organized so often report favourably on them. Gary Hamel is a good writer in addition to having good thoughts.

Part One of the book is where Gary challenges us to think. I was contemplating writing an article before I read the book on, "The Power of Excess Resources", or "Is It Possible to be Too Efficient?"

Here is what Gary Hamel has to say:

Contrary to popular mythology, the thing that most impedes innovation in large companies is not a lack of risk taking. Big companies take big, and often imprudent, risks every day. The real brake on innovation is the drag of old mental models. Long-serving executives often have a big chunk of their emotional capital invested in the existing strategy.

In the pursuit of efficiency, companies have wrung a lot of slack out of their operations. Thatâ(tm)s a good thing. No one can argue with the goal of cutting inventory levels, reducing working capital, and slashing overhead. The problem, though, is that if you wring all the slack out of a company, youâ(tm)ll wring out all of the innovation as well. Innovation takes time â" time to dream, time to reflect, time to learn, time to invent, and time to experiment. And it takes uninterrupted time - time when you can put your feet up and stare off into space.

In section one he also explains what a huge percentage of people are not fully engaged in their work at all levels of the company. As English novelist, Ian Forster said, "A person with passion is better than 40 people merely interested."

He also talked about too much management with too little freedom. The gist of that message is that often managers are over-managed.

Part Two moves into a series of stories about real businesses and real people including: Whole Foods, Goretex, and Google.

One thing that I donâ(tm)t like about many authors is when they talk about company success stories, they tend to attribute success to some characteristic they point out when I think they may have pointed out the wrong characteristic so there might not be a link with success. I also note that every circumstance is different at any different time so it is very difficult to take one solution and apply it to another circumstance. Unfortunately, we all still need to think.

Part Three talks about our beliefs. Sometimes our past success can lead to future failure. It is all about change.

One thing I particularly like about this part is a chapter on Learning from the Fringe which basically points out that many of the better ideas and innovations might not come from the existing business or even the existing managers. They often come from the fringes of the organization or the fringe of the business they do.

In Part Four â" The Building of the Future of Management, talks about management 2.0 and what will the new management look like and how to become effective.

This book was thoroughly enjoyable and I would highly recommend it to any leader.

An invaluable "guide to inventing tomorrow's best practices today"

As he clearly indicates in his earlier books, notably in Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and then in Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel's mission in life is to exorcise "the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management" so that decision-makers can free themselves from what James O'Toole aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." In his Preface to this volume, written with Bill Breen, Hamel asserts that "today's best practices aren't good enough" and later suggests that he wrote this book for "dreamers and doers" who want to invent "tomorrow's best practices today." In this brilliant book, he explains how to do that.

In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who read my review to get a "taste." Here is a representative selection of Hamel's insights:

"To thrive in an increasingly disruptive world, companies must become as strategically adaptable as they are operationally efficient. To safeguard their margins, they must become gushers of rule-breaking innovation. And if they're going to out-invent and outthink as growing mob of upstarts, they must learn how to inspire their employees to give the very best of themselves every day. These are the challenges that must be addressed by 21st-century management innovators." (Page 11)

"Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a particularly grave threat to timely renewal. The first is the tendency of management teams to deny or ignore the need for a strategy reboot. The second is a dearth of compelling alternatives to the status quo, which often leads to strategic paralysis. And the third: allocational rigidities that make it difficult to deploy talent and capital behind new initiatives. Each of these barriers stands in the way of zero-trauma change; hence each deserves to be a focal point for management innovation." (Page 44)

"Skepticism and humility are important attributes for a management innovator - yet they're not enough. To create space for management innovation you will need to systematically deconstruct the management orthodoxies that bind you and your colleagues to new possibilities. Here's how to get started. Pick a big management issue like change, innovation, or employee engagement, and then assemble 10 or 20 of your colleagues. Ask each of them to write down ten things they believe about the nominated problem. Have them inscribe each belief on a Post-it note. Then plaster the stickies on a wall and group similar beliefs together." Then sustain a rigorous discussion during which all premises and assumptions are challenged. "To escape the straitjacket of conventional thinking, you have to be able to distinguish between beliefs that describe the world as it is, and describe the world as it is and must forever remain." Focus on what can be changed...and should be changed. (Pages 130-131)

I especially appreciate Hamel's analysis of three exemplary companies: Whole Foods Market (a "community of purpose"), W.L. Gore (an "innovation democracy"), and Google ("brink-of-chaos management"). Hamel focuses his attention to how these companies invent tomorrow's best practices today. He cleverly juxtaposes a "management innovation challenge" with each company's "distinctive management practices." Having established and then sustained a one-on-one rapport with his reader throughout the narrative, Hamel makes it crystal clear that that he is not urging his reader to address the same challenges and develop the same best practices for any one of the three exemplary companies, much less emulate all three. That would be insane.

"There isn't any law that prevents large organizations from being engaging, innovative, and adaptive - and mostly bureaucracy free. Even better, it really is possible to set the human spirit free at work. So no more excuses. It's time for you to buckle down and start inventing the future of management...My goal in writing this book was not to predict the future of management but to help you invent it...From the first time since the dawning of the industrial age, the only way to build a company that's fit for the future is to build one that is fit for human beings as well."

So, there's Gary Hamel's challenge: Start your own "revolution" and lead it. If you don't, who will?