The Future of Management (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Gary Hamel is a Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management of the London Business School, co-Founder of international consulting company Strategos and Director of the Management Innovation Lab. He is the author of several business books, such as Leading the Revolution, Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and numerous articles for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and other class-leading publications. This book was published in 2007, consists of 4 parts and a total of 11 chapters. Hamel's books are never boring and this one is almost as radical as `Leading the Revolution'. This fact is highlighted in Hamel's introduction of the goal of this book: "My goal is to help you become a 21st-century management pioneer; to equip you to reinvent the principles, processes, and practices of management for our postmodern age."

The three chapters of Part I explain why management innovation matters, whereby the author argues that modern-day management has evolved rapidly in the first half of the 20th century but that the "technology" of management has now reached a local peak rather than a 8,000 metres Himalaya monster. "In fact, most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War." In the second chapter, Hamel explains management innovation: "Put simply, management innovation changes the way managers do what they do, and also does so in a way that enhances organizational performance." Chapter 3 proposes an agenda for management innovation, whereby one is "going to need a passion for some very specific, very noble challenge" in order to invent the future of management. It is "a passion for solving extraordinary problems that creates the potential for extraordinary accomplishment."

Part II - Management Innovation in Action's chapters 4, 5 and 6 explain Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore and Google as examples of management innovators. This part serves the author's goal "to demonstrate that it really is possible to defy management orthodoxy and still run a successful business; that you can flout conventional management wisdom and still ship products on time, satisfy exacting customers, and deliver mouthwatering results. Turns out, we haven't reached the end of management. We really can reinvent the way big companies are structured and run. ... So no more excuses. It's time for you to buckle down and start inventing the future of management."

In the first chapter of Part III - Imaging the Future of Management, we come across the search for better ways to emancipate and compound human capability, whereby all of these searches start with simplest of all questions, Why? In Chapter 7 Hamel introduces five key design rules for building companies that are fit for the future. "... the task of reinventing management for the 21st century is going to take time. But what you can and must do is to get your colleagues thinking and talking about the opportunity to reinvent your company's management DNA." The next chapter introduces some new management principles, which combine big ideas with the power to inspire dramatic changes in tradition-bound processes and practices. Chapter 9 concludes this part and helps you extract maximum value out of your journey to the fringe. The author introduces 6 questions for this purpose.

The first chapter of Part 4 - Building the Future of Management recaps the 9 rules for management innovators. The final chapter introduces the 5 essential building blocks for management innovation, whereby the goal [of management of innovation] is for companies to gain a performance advantage by first amplify and then aggregate human effort. Hamel concludes this book with: "Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millennium won't be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations."

Yes, I do like this book. It is just like the other books (co-)written by Gary Hamel and challenges the reader. This book in particular requires the reader to have a good look at existing management and business practices and see whether these can be done in a radical new innovative manner. But be warned, this exercise to reinvent management for the 21st century is going to take time and can probably best be started through thinking and talking with colleagues. Recommended to all looking for new ways to do business and manage.

I recently came across this fascinating new book by Gary Hamel in the course of my investigation of Agile.

It's perhaps the best book I've read on innovation - and the best book I've read on desirable management culture. It's a real joy to read.

I'll cast my vote any day for the kind of pro-innovation pro-enablement management culture Hamel describes. It's the approach that has great potential to motivate key employees.

It includes chapters on the remarkable management cultures at Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex etc), and a small little upstart called Google.

Here's a quote from around 20% of the way in: "if you want to capture the economic high ground in the creative economy, you need employees who are more than acquiescent, attentive, and astute - they must also be zestful, zany, and zealous. So we must ask: what are the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving this state of organisational bliss?"

The rest of the book provides answers to this question.

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?