Gary Hamel quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Gary Hamel on Wise Famous Quotes.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

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

Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.

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

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.

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 a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.

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

To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.

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

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

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.

Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.

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

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

Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.

We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.

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

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

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

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

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

Only stupid questions create wealth.

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.

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

There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.

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

It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.

All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.

Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.

But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)

A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy

Obviously, you don't have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.

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

People are all there is to an organization

Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

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

There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.

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

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

Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.

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

When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating.

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

To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.

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

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

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.
[2002] p.46

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.

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

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

We don't know where we're going, but we're not going to stray from familiar paths.

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

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

Are we changing as fast as the world around us?

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

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