Top 100 Hamel's Quotes
#1. But he was a filthy pirate. They were Arobynn Hamel's assassin-educated, wealthy, refined. Slavery was beneath them.
Sarah J. Maas
#2. Never before has the gap between what we can imagine and what we can accomplish been smaller.
Gary Hamel
#3. Any company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it.
Gary Hamel
#4. Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.
Gary Hamel
#5. 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
#6. Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.
Gary Hamel
#7. Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.
Gary Hamel
#8. In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.
Gary Hamel
#9. I don't want to come off like a girl scout and 'Isn't she sweet?' but the honest-to-God truth is I had seven years of a great show. It put me on the map. Yes, I'm associated with Joyce, but this is not chopped liver.
Veronica Hamel
#10. We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.
Gary Hamel
#11. Your organization can start tweeting, but that wont change its DNA.
Gary Hamel
#12. A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy
Gary Hamel
#13. 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
#14. Thank you for the oil," he added. "My skin was a little dry.
Sarah J. Maas
#15. 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
#16. From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.
Gary Hamel
#17. 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
#18. We don't know where we're going, but we're not going to stray from familiar paths.
Gary Hamel
#19. I thought I'd have time to become a movie star. And it didn't happen, did it? We're still waiting. And they're saying, 'Don't hold your breath, kid.' Even movie stars can't get movies, you know what I mean?
Veronica Hamel
#20. 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
#21. Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.
Gary Hamel
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)
Gary Hamel
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. When it comes to innovation, a company's legacy beliefs are a much bigger liability than its legacy costs. - Gary Hamel
Jackie Fenn
#34. It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.
Gary Hamel
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.
Gary Hamel
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Gary Hamel
#42. 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
#43. I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.
Gary Hamel
#44. You can't use an old map to see a new land.
Gary Hamel
#45. 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.
Gary Hamel
#46. As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
Gary Hamel
#47. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.
Gary Hamel
#48. 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
#49. Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.
Gary Hamel
#50. Arobynn only smiled at her, taller by a head. And when he reached out, she allowed him to brush his knuckles down her cheek. The calluses on is fingers said enough about how often he practiced. I do not expect you to trust me; I do not expect you to love me.
Sarah J. Maas
#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. Are we changing as fast as the world around us?
Gary Hamel
#53. Obviously, you don't have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.
Gary Hamel
#54. She'd been only eight when Arobynn Hamel, her mentor and the King of the Assassins, found her half-submerged on the banks of a frozen river and brought her to his keep on the border between Adarlan and Terrasen.
Sarah J. Maas
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I feel like I was just one pair of insanely high heels away from getting propositioned on the street.
B.B. Hamel
#58. Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.
Gary Hamel
#59. For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.
Gary Hamel
#60. Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.
Michael Winter
#61. 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.
Gary Hamel
#62. I was drawn to him inexplicably, like a planet pulled towards a star.
B.B. Hamel
#63. 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
#64. The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.
Gary Hamel
#65. There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.
Gary Hamel
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history.
Gary Hamel
#69. The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.
Michael Winter
#70. 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
#71. We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.
Gary Hamel
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Companies do not do new things because they understand it but because they feel it.
Gary Hamel
#75. People are all there is to an organization
Gary Hamel
#76. A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
Gary Hamel
#77. Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.
Gary Hamel
#78. If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.
Gary Hamel
#79. Farran studied his new ally, his gaze glittering. "You have no idea." After another moment, he asked, "Why did you do it?"
Arobynn's attention drifted back to the wagon, already a small dot in the rolling foothills above Rifthold. "Because I don't like sharing my belongings.
Sarah J. Maas
#80. your dad just got married without telling you about it.
B.B. Hamel
#81. 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.
Gary Hamel
#82. 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
#83. Why do my legs hurt from driving?" I said out loud. "I don't know. Mine are sore too." "That's from running around my mind all day." "Good one."
-Camden & Lacey
B.B. Hamel
#84. 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
#85. This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.
Gary Hamel
#86. Only stupid questions create wealth.
Gary Hamel
#87. The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.
Gary Hamel
#89. Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.
Gary Hamel
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
Gary Hamel
#94. 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.
Gary Hamel
#95. 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?
Gary Hamel
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The value of your network is the square of the number of people in it.
Gary Hamel
#99. Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.
Gary Hamel
#100. In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.
Gary Hamel
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