Gary Hamel Quotes

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

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

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

The problem with the future is that it is different, if you are unable to think differently, the future will always arrive as a surprise.

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

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.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.

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

The best innovations - both socially and economically - come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love. These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing. And that’s why the heart of innovation is a desire to re-enchant the world.

Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who's forging a bullet with your company's name on it. You've got one option now - to shoot first. You've got to out innovate the innovators.

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

Only stupid questions create wealth.

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

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

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

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

One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.

Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company's name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can't dodge the bullet – you're going to have to shoot first. You're going to have to out-innovate the innovators.

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

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

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

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

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