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Gary Hamel
The opinionated, sometimes acerbic, voice of contemporary strategy, Gary Hamel (b. 1954) is co-author of Competing for the Future and, more recently, Leading the Revolution (2000). Hamel looks set to match Michael Porter's achievements, combining intelle
co-author of Competing for the Future and, Leading the Revolution

The opinionated, sometimes acerbic, voice of contemporary strategy, Gary Hamel (b. 1954) is co-author of Competing for the Future and, more recently, Leading the Revolution (2000). Hamel looks set to match Michael Porter's achievements, combining intellectual vigor and empire building zeal. He lists his most meaningful achievement as "finding a group of people crazy enough and who care enough to start company committed to upsizing rather than downsizing". Perhaps, but Hamel also brings aphoristic energy to the turgid world of management writing. Leading the Revolution includes such bon mots as "get off the treadmill of incrementation", "heretics not prophets create revolutions" and "You can't use an old map to find new land." Not Jane Austen.

Hamel is a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School. California-based Hamel is also a consultant to major companies and chairman of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company. Strategos proclaims that it is "dedicated to helping its clients get to the future first". It runs the Strategos Institute - a "client-sponsored multi-disciplinary research program" - and the Strategos Practice - "a partner not a consulting company". The selling point is the quality of the ideas and access to big hitting intellectuals - its clients include Royal Dutch/Shell, Emerson Electric and Nokia.

Topics

Innovation From Everyone, Every Day


In a world filled with new, ultra-low cost competitors, ever more powerful customers and hyper-competitive markets, innovation is the only way to out-perform the industry average. In a compelling keynote presentation based on twenty years of ground-breaking research and a score of high-profile assignments in some of the world’s most respected companies, Hamel shows you and your colleagues how to:


•Unlock the innovation potential of every employee


•Build a portfolio of high-impact, game-changing strategies


•Dramatically multiply the returns on innovation investment


•Build management systems that keep everyone focused on innovation


•Manage the day-to-day tension between innovation and operational efficiency


A Company That is as Nimble as Change Itself


As the pace of change accelerates so must the pace of strategic renewal in every organization. All too often deep change is crisis-driven and episodic; too seldom is it opportunity-driven and continuous. In this informative keynote speech, Hamel draws on his pioneering work on strategic “resilience” to help your company:


•Recognize the warning signs of “strategy decay”


•Overcome the arrogance and denial that so often frustrates strategic renewal


•Build a future-oriented vision that is powerful enough to overcome the gravitational pull of the past
•Accelerate the shift of resources from legacy programs to future-oriented initiatives


•Weave the principles of resilience into every management process and practice


The Ultimate Competitive Advantage


Over the past 100 years, the most profound and enduring shifts in competitive position have come from management innovation—dramatic breakthroughs in how companies are managed, led and structured. Hamel delivers a thought provoking keynote speech based on his most recent research. Hamel has developed a methodology that can help your company build the ultimate competitive advantage—an ability to proactively reinvent its management DNA. Specifically, he can show your company how to:


•Anticipate the “over-the-horizon” management challenges that will determine success in the years ahead

•Successfully challenge the outmoded management orthodoxies that limit success

•Uncover the new management principles that will determine industry leadership in the future

•Build a capability for ongoing management innovation across your company.
The Future of Management
Though this authoritative examination of today's static corporate management systems reads like a business school treatise, it isn't the same-old thing. Hamel, a well-known business thinker and author (Leading the Revolution), advocates that dogma be rooted out and a new future be imagined and invented. To aid managers and leaders on this mission, Hamel offers case studies and measured analysis of management innovators like Google and W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), then lists lessons that can be drawn from them. He doesn't gloss over how difficult it will be to reinvent management, comparing the new and needed shift in thinking to Darwin's abandoning creationist traditions and physicists who had to look beyond Newton's clockwork laws to discover quantum mechanics. But the steps needed to make such a profound shift aren't clearly outlined here either. The book serves primarily as an invitation to shed age-old systems and processes and think differently. There's little humor and few punchy catchphrases—the book has less sparkle than Jeffrey Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking?—but its content will likely appeal to managers accustomed to b-school textbooks and tired of gimmicky business evangelism. (Oct.)

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