Gary Hamel

World-Renowned Author, Speaker & Business Thought Leader.

Director of Management Innovation eXchange.

Gary Hamel speaker, conferencias, management

The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Gary Hamel as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy.”

English

Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School and Distinguished Professor at Harvard University School of Business, Gary Hamel has become the most influential thinker in business management, with some 50 presentations a year and a business of consultancy of 3,000 million a year.

He has published eight articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), three of them awarded the McKinsey Award for best article of the year. Among them is “The Core Competence of the Corporation”, which is the most widely read article by the HBR in its entire history.

With his professor in Michigan and friend C.K. Prahalad (recently deceased) published “Competing for the Future” in 1994, a book that turned strategy around as we had understood it until now, and was considered the management book of the year.

Hamel says that if he hadn’t written “Competing for the Future” and “Redefining the Strategy,” the Strategic Management experts probably would have had to find another job. In his award-winning HBR article in 1996, “Strategy as Revolution”, he criticizes strategy as an elitist procedure for following the rules of the sector, and considers it as synonymous with revolution.

In his most recent work “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them,” Gary Hamel argues that in the age of turmoil, top-down power structures and management systems stifled by rules are a drag. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. It also defends the need for organizations to be bold, entrepreneurial and as agile as change itself. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy presents a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspirational and resourceful as the human beings within them.

In his lectures he uses some frequent examples such as the case of Charles Schwab in the financial sector and that of Wal-Mart in distribution. The problem in companies, Hamel repeats, is not a shortage of resources, but a shortage of imagination. Hamel is one of the world’s most sought-after management speakers on the topics of strategy, leadership, innovation and change.

INNOVATION FROM EVERYONE, EVERY DAY.

Every human being has within them a creative spark, yet our organizations harness only a fraction of that latent imagination. While 79% of leaders rank innovation as a top priority, 94% say their organizations aren’t as innovative as they need to be. What gives? If innovation is so important, why do most companies struggle with it? Because few of them have taken a systematic approach to making innovation instinctive for every individual and intrinsic to the organization itself. For innovation to become a genuine core competence, organizations must …

Build creative capital. While most people have creative instincts, it takes practice to learn to think like a gamechanger. You wouldn’t expect someone to hit a golf ball 200 yards down the fairway without a bit of training. So it is with innovation. The quickest way to increase the innovation output of any company is to teach everyone how to upend conventional thinking, intercept emerging trends and invent novel solutions to deep customer needs.

Re-tool the management model. Over the past decade, many companies re-engineered their operating model for speed and efficiency. Few, though, have retooled their management model for innovation. This is now an imperative. Every management system—planning, resource allocation, performance management, compensation and training—must facilitate rather than frustrate innovation. Companies that fail to take a systematic approach to this challenge will soon find themselves preempted by their competitors and abandoned by their customers.

Over the past three decades, Gary Hamel has taught hundreds of thousands of individuals how to imagine and build the future. He has also helped many of the world’s most admired companies design and build innovation-friendly management practices. The result: boldly creative teams and billions of dollars added to the top line.

BUILDING AN EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE.

The winds of creative destruction are howling. Change is exponential and unrelenting. In this environment, the most important question for any organization is, “Are we changing as fast as the world around us?” Sadly, for many organizations the answer is no. Today, there are many who expect the old guard to lose. After all, in a hyper-kinetic world, resources count for less than resource-fulness, and companies that fall behind tend to stay behind.

All too often, deep change is the product of crisis—it’s belated, convulsive and typically insufficient. The challenge, then, is to build an organization that can change as fast as change itself, that possesses an “evolutionary advantage.” Such an organization would . . .

Rush out to meet the future.
Change before it had to.
Consistently redefine customer expectations.
Capture more than its share of new opportunities.
Avoid unexpected earnings shocks.
Consistently out-perform competitors.

Building an evolutionary advantage requires more than new practices—it also requires new principles. Most organizations were built on the principles of standardization, formalization, specialization, alignment and discipline. These are fine principles, but now we must embrace new principles: experimentation, openness, meritocracy, freedom and audacity. These cannot be mere buzzwords, but must be embedded deeply in structures, systems and behaviors.

Building an evolutionary advantage may seem like a Herculean task. It’s not. In his pioneering work, Gary Hamel has demonstrated that with courage and tenacity, any company can learn to outrun change.

BUSTING BUREAUCRACY, FOR GOOD.

If you want to win in a world of nimble, hungry upstarts, bureaucracy has to die. Young companies are bold, flexible and quick. Big companies, not so much. Research suggests that an excess of bureaucracy—too many layers and too many rules—costs OECD economies $9 trillion each year in lost economic output. Nevertheless, most struggle to imagine an alternative. Bureaucracy seems essential for achieving the control, coordination and consistency that allow large organizations to function. For decades that was true. Now it is not.

A growing number of vanguard companies are proving it is possible to buy the benefits of bureaucracy duty-free. On average, these post-bureaucratic trailblazers enjoy a 30-50% productivity advantage over their peers, and are far more fleet-footed. Svenska Handelsbanken, the world’s most consistently profitable bank, has three management layers. Nucor, the highly innovative steel-maker has no central R&D and a head office of fewer than 100 individuals. Haier, a global leader in the appliance industry, has turned itself into a “platform” of 4,000 highly autonomous “micro-enterprises.” Turns out you can be big and fast, efficient and supple, disciplined and courageous.

For more than a decade, Gary Hamel has been helping progressive-minded organizations “uninstall” bureaucracy. Doing so requires three things…

Motivation: Organizations get serious about busting bureaucracy when they start to measure its hidden costs. Every organization needs to calculate its BMI—“Bureaucracy Mass Index.”
Models: It’s hard to begin a journey when you can’t imagine the destination. Luckily, the post-bureaucratic pioneers help point us in the right direction.
Migration: You don’t build a post-bureaucratic organization with a grand, top-down change program. Instead, you must build migration paths by launching many small, yet radical, experiments designed to test and refine new, “post-bureaucratic” practices. The payoff: an organization that is flat, open and free.

Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring. Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In the age of upheaval, top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems are a liability. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. As leaders, employees, investors, and citizens, we deserve better. We need organizations that are bold, entrepreneurial, and as nimble as change itself. Hence this book.

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them. Critical building blocks include:

Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracy
Models: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quo
Mindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progress
Mobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes
Migration: Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNAIf you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit . . .

If you want to build an organization that can outrun change . . . If you're committed to giving every team member the chance to learn, grow, and contribute . . . . . . then this book's for you. Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to equip and empower everyone in your organization to be their best and to do their best. The ultimate prize: an organization that's fit for the future and fit for human beings.

Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.

What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

This is not a book about one thing. It's not a 250-page dissertation on leadership, teams or motivation. Instead, it's an agenda for building organizations that can flourish in a world of diminished hopes, relentless change and ferocious competition.
This is not a book about doing better. It's not a manual for people who want to tinker at the margins. Instead, it's an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it--to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.

Leaders today confront a world where the unprecedented is the norm. Wherever one looks, one sees the exceptional and the extraordinary: Business newspapers decrying the state of capitalism. Once-innovative companies struggling to save off senescence. Next gen employees shunning blue chips for social start-ups. Corporate miscreants getting pilloried in the blogosphere. Entry barriers tumbling in what were once oligopolistic strongholds. Hundred year-old business models being rendered irrelevant overnight. Newbie organizations crowdsourcing their most creative work. National governments lurching towards bankruptcy. Investors angrily confronting greedy CEOs and complacent boards. Newly omnipotent customers eagerly wielding their power. Social media dramatically transforming the way human beings connect, learn and collaborate.

Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth isn't. That's why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere who are eager to... move from defense to offense reverse the tide of commoditization defeat bureaucracy astonish their customers foster extraordinary contribution capture the moral high ground outrun change build a company that's truly fit for the future

Concise and to the point, the book will inspire you to rethink your business, your company and how you lead.

What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

Leading the Revolution

One of the world's preeminent business thinkers and co-author of the bestseller, Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel helped set the management agenda for the 1990s. He now brings us into the twenty-first century with Leading the Revolution, which spent time on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Business Week bestseller lists, among others. In his new book, Gary Hamel lays out an innovative action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming-and staying-an industry revolutionary, for years to come. By drawing on the success of "gray haired revolutionaries" like Charles Schwab, Virgin, and GE Capital-companies who are always thinking ahead of the game and growing in new directions-and profiling individuals such as Ken Kutaragi, one of the pioneers of Sony Playstation, Hamel explains how companies can continue to grow, innovate, and achieve success, even in a chaotic world market. With insight culled from years of experience, Hamel:

Explores where revolutionary new business concepts come from
Identifies the key design criteria for building companies that are activist-friendly and revolution-ready
Shows how to avoid becoming "one-vision wonders"
Demonstrates how to harness the imagination of every employee
Explains how to develop new financial measures that focus on creating new wealth

Packed with practical advice, Leading the Revolution is an accessible read, perfect for both businesses and individuals that don't want to get caught in the slow lane in the race for success in the twenty-first century.shunning blue chips for social start-ups. Corporate miscreants getting pilloried in the blogosphere. Entry barriers tumbling in what were once oligopolistic strongholds. Hundred year-old business models being rendered irrelevant overnight. Newbie organizations crowdsourcing their most creative work. National governments lurching towards bankruptcy. Investors angrily confronting greedy CEOs and complacent boards. Newly omnipotent customers eagerly wielding their power. Social media dramatically transforming the way human beings connect, learn and collaborate.

Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth isn't. That's why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere who are eager to... move from defense to offense reverse the tide of commoditization defeat bureaucracy astonish their customers foster extraordinary contribution capture the moral high ground outrun change build a company that's truly fit for the future

Concise and to the point, the book will inspire you to rethink your business, your company and how you lead.

Leading the Revolution

EL FUTURO DEL MANAGEMENT

No obstante, la mayoría de las empresas carecen de un proceso disciplinado para llevar a cabo una innovación radical en el management. En su libro más provocador hasta la fecha, Hamel carga contra las creencias heredadas que impiden a las empresas del siglo XXI superar los nuevos retos. Con un análisis incisivo y ejemplos muy ilustrativos, Hamel explica cómo convertir cualquier compañía en una maquinaria innovadora. Prepárese para romper con el pasado. Las empresas que conquistarán el mañana serán aquéllas que empiecen a inventar el futuro del management hoy.

EL FUTURO DEL MANAGEMENT