Gary Hamel Quotes
Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied.
Quotes to Explore
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You have to train people how to be business innovators. If you don't train them, the quality of the ideas that you get in an innovation marketplace is not likely to be high.
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A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
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I'm not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.
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A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.
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Obviously, you don't have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.
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To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
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The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
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What's true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That's why the most resilient things in our world - biological life, stock markets, the Internet - are loosely organized.
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In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.
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Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.
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I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partly responsible for Silicon Valley's feverish, get-it-done-yesterday work norms.
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It's not unusual for a would-be entrepreneur to get turned down half a dozen times before finding a willing investor - yet in most companies, it takes only one 'nyet' to kill a project stone dead.
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I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.
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Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.
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Most companies don't have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.
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As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.
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Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.
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As the great grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned, at last, that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanimity and our very souls demand something better, something different.
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Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.
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The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.
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In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.
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An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.
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Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.
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Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied.