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e have reached the end of progress. Incrementalism is no longer enough. In the new economy, the companies that create new wealth are truly revolutionaries: they upend long-held industry conventions, they fearlessly challenge the old guard, and they amaze their customers with products and services that could scarcely have been imagined a few years earlier. In doing so, they render existing business models obsolete. In this environment, the most fearsome threat to continued success is not inefficiency but irrelevancy. Any company that is not an industry revolutionary is already on the road to insignificance. Industry revolution is the product of strategy innovation. In an increasingly non-linear world, only non-linear strategies will create new wealth. As companies move beyond the incremental, strategy innovation—the capacity to reconceive product and service concepts, redraw market boundaries, and radically alter deep-down industry economics—will become the next critical competitive advantage. Strategy innovation is the only way for a company to renew its lease on success.
Yet most companies are built for continuous improvement, rather than for discontinuous innovation. They know how to get better, but they don't know how to get different. In a world where incumbency is worth next to nothing, a company must be capable of reinventing its deepest sense of self and its core business concept not once a decade, in the midst of a crisis, when it trades out one CEO for another, but continuously, year after year. Twenty years ago the challenge was quality. Ten years ago the challenge was re-engineering. Now the challenge is strategy innovation.
Leading the Revolution 2000
Available at Amazon.com
Competing for the Future 1996
Available at Amazon.com
Building a deep capacity for strategy innovation requires a company to imbue its employees with new passions, as well as new skills. It requires a never-ending effort to engage and capture the imagination of every single individual. It requires that top management surrender its monopoly on setting strategic direction. It requires a relentless quest to bring profoundly new benefits to customers. It requires allegiance to new financial measures that focus attention on the challenge of creating new wealth. It requires a relentless search for new business concepts. It requires the total absence of nostalgia for old business concepts. It requires a relentless attack on anything that inhibits innovation. It requires that companies encourage and celebrate activism at all levels. It requires companies to create vibrant internal markets for innovation, capital and talent.
In Leading the Revolution, Professor Gary Hamel, the world's most profound business thinker, lays out a clear plan of action for any company intent on becoming—and staying—an industry revolutionary. Leading the Revolution is not a book for dilettantes. It is not a book for corner-office types who would rather protect their prerogatives than overthrow industry orthodoxy. It is not a book for those who need reassurance that they're already doing "the right thing." Leading the Revolution is a book for those who want to make a difference-in their world and in their organization. It is a book for those who are tired of playing it safe. It is a book for people who care so much about their customers, their colleagues and their own legacy that they can't imagine not Leading the Revolution.
Woodside Institute Strategos
650-851-2095 gary@woodsideinstitute.net
http://www.garyhamel.com/author.htm
Gary Hamel Talks Strategy Conference
In November 2001 BusinessLab brought Gary Hamel to Scottish shores. Gary Hamel is widely regarded as a management “guru” in the company of Peter Drucker, Charles Handy and Michael Porter. (www.thinkers50.com/) The Economist states that Professor Hamel is ‘the world’s reigning strategy guru’, whilst his book Competing for the Future, co-authored with CK Prahalad has become gospel for business managers. Several hundred delegates attended the event in Glasgow, where Professor Hamel spoke on the need for radical thinking in turbulent times, and expanded upon some of the concepts in his most recent best-selling business book, Leading the Revolution. Professor Hamel was joined in a masterclass session by Professor Peter McKiernan, Head of Business Strategy at the University of St. Andrews.www.leadingtherevolution.com.