The Future of Management

by Gary Hamel, Bill Breen

Overview

What fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation—new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. Through history, management innovation has enabled companies to cross new performance thresholds and build enduring advantages.

In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century—centered on control and efficiency—no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management.

Hamel explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, revealing:

The make-or-break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of relentless, head-snapping change.
The toxic effects of traditional management beliefs.
The unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in “modern management pioneers.”
The radical principles that will need to become part of every company’s “management DNA.”
The steps your company can take now to build your “management advantage.”

Practical and profound, The Future of Management features examples from Google, W.L. Gore, Whole Foods, IBM, Samsung, Best Buy, and other blue-ribbon management innovators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781422102503
Publisher:	Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date:	09/10/2007
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. He is the author of Leading the Revolution and coauthor of Competing for the Future.

Table of Contents

Preface     ix
Acknowledgments     xiii
Why Management Innovation Matters
The End of Management?     3
The Ultimate Advantage     19
An Agenda for Management Innovation     37
Management Innovation in Action
Creating a Community of Purpose     69
Building an Innovation Democracy     83
Aiming for an Evolutionary Advantage     101
Imagining the Future of Management
Escaping the Shackles     125
Embracing New Principles     147
Learning from the Fringe     185
Building the Future, of Management
Becoming a Management Innovator     215
Building the Future of Management     241
Notes     257
Index     265
About the Author     271

Editorial Reviews

His casual and frank writing style makes this akin to a one-on-one management master-class he is holding for you every morning for a week at Starbucks. No decaf allowed.

USA Today

There's much here that will resonate with forward-thinking managers.

BusinessWeek

Here's a great idea from Gary Hamel . . .

Forbes.com

If companies now innovate by creating new products or new business models . . . why can't they do the same in how they manage organizations?

The New York Times

...he offers an intriguing account of what managing in the future is going to look like.

The Financial Times

Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life...Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work.

Fortune

Among the prescriptions . . . more incentives for employees at all levels, and clearer ties between results and recognition.

Fast Company

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.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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