Top 100 Gary Hamel Quotes
#1. A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
Gary Hamel
#2. People are all there is to an organization
Gary Hamel
#3. If corporate leaders and their acolytes are not slaves to some meritorious social purpose, they run the risk of being enslaved by their own ignoble appetites.
Gary Hamel
#4. 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.
Gary Hamel
#5. It's not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it's that they no longer believe society's most powerful institutions are acting in their interests.
Gary Hamel
#6. For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history.
Gary Hamel
#7. At the pinnacle of great design are products so gorgeous and lust-worthy that you want to lick them: a Porsche 911, Samsung's Luxia TV, an Eames lounge chair or anything by Loro Piana.
Gary Hamel
#8. To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
Gary Hamel
#9. Are we changing as fast as the world around us?
Gary Hamel
#10. 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.
Gary Hamel
#11. For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.
Gary Hamel
#12. 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.
Gary Hamel
#13. Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.
Gary Hamel
#14. Obviously, you don't have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.
Gary Hamel
#15. There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.
Gary Hamel
#16. In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.
Gary Hamel
#17. Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.
Gary Hamel
#18. 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.
Gary Hamel
#19. Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.
Gary Hamel
#20. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
Gary Hamel
#21. Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
Gary Hamel
#22. 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.
Gary Hamel
#23. 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.
Gary Hamel
#24. Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.
Gary Hamel
#25. The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.
Gary Hamel
#26. Only stupid questions create wealth.
Gary Hamel
#27. 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.
Gary Hamel
#28. 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.
Gary Hamel
#29. If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.
Gary Hamel
#30. Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.
Gary Hamel
#31. All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.
[2002] p.46
Gary Hamel
#32. But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)
Gary Hamel
#33. It's not unusual for a would-be entrepreneur to get turned down half a dozen times before finding a willing investor - yet in most companies, it takes only one 'nyet' to kill a project stone dead.
Gary Hamel
#34. Over time, a successful company will acquire much in the way of resources and momentum, and these things often insulate it from reality once it has stopped being successful.
Gary Hamel
#35. 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.
Gary Hamel
#36. An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.
Gary Hamel
#37. Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.
Gary Hamel
#38. We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.
Gary Hamel
#39. We don't know where we're going, but we're not going to stray from familiar paths.
Gary Hamel
#40. Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.
Gary Hamel
#41. From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.
Gary Hamel
#42. In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.
Gary Hamel
#43. 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
Gary Hamel
#44. A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy
Gary Hamel
#45. We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.
Gary Hamel
#46. Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.
Gary Hamel
#47. Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.
Gary Hamel
#48. I was frustrated for a long time with my colleagues in the business school world and with so many management authors who didn't really see themselves as innovators. They were glorified journalists.
Gary Hamel
#49. Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.
Gary Hamel
#50. Any company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it.
Gary Hamel
#51. In a democracy, you don't need anyone's permission to form a new political party, publish a politically charged article, or organize a 'tea party.' And in open markets, individuals are free to buy and invest as they see fit.
Gary Hamel
#52. Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.
Gary Hamel
#53. 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.
Gary Hamel
#54. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.
Gary Hamel
#55. As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
Gary Hamel
#56. You can't use an old map to see a new land.
Gary Hamel
#57. 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.
Gary Hamel
#58. 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.
Gary Hamel
#59. In most languages, 'control' is the first synonym for the word 'manage.' Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control, one must first constrain.
Gary Hamel
#60. 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.
Gary Hamel
#61. Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
Gary Hamel
#62. 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.
Gary Hamel
#63. Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.
Gary Hamel
#64. 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.
Gary Hamel
#65. In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.
Gary Hamel
#66. your boss is an older sibling. You'll always be respectful, but you won't hesitate to offer frank advice when you think it's warranted - and you'll never suck up.
Gary Hamel
#67. 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.
Gary Hamel
#68. Strategy is, above all else, the search for above average returns.
Gary Hamel
#69. Our biggest challenge is how to create a self-renewing company.
Gary Hamel
#70. To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.
Gary Hamel
#71. 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.
Gary Hamel
#72. 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.
Gary Hamel
#73. 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.
Gary Hamel
#74. When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating.
Gary Hamel
#75. All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.
Gary Hamel
#76. The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.
Gary Hamel
#77. 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.
Gary Hamel
#78. 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.
Gary Hamel
#79. 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.
Gary Hamel
#80. There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.
Gary Hamel
#81. 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.
Gary Hamel
#82. Organizational structures of today demand too much from a few, and not much at all from everyone else.
Gary Hamel
#83. What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination
Gary Hamel
#84. An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.
Gary Hamel
#85. 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.
Gary Hamel
#86. It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.
Gary Hamel
#87. 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.
Gary Hamel
#88. Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.
Gary Hamel
#89. While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.
Gary Hamel
#90. Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.
Gary Hamel
#91. The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
Gary Hamel
#92. A well-conceived product excels at what it does. It's close to being functionally flawless - like a Ziploc bag, a radio from Tivoli Audio, a Philips Sonicare toothbrush, a Nespresso coffee maker or Google's home page.
Gary Hamel
#93. 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 it's pretty much the whole game today.
Gary Hamel
#94. To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.
Gary Hamel
#95. You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.
Gary Hamel
#96. An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.
Gary Hamel
#97. 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.
Gary Hamel
#98. Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.
Gary Hamel
#99. If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.
Gary Hamel
#100. As the great grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned, at last, that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanimity and our very souls demand something better, something different.
Gary Hamel
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