Quotes from Gary Hamel

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don't do paradox very well.** (emphasis by author) [2002] p.25f

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.

New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

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.

If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.

All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.

There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.

To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.

Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

Executives often wrongly equate "good value" with "low price." Instead, "good value" should mean outstanding value for the price.

But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)

Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.

the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer is no.

what oral historian Studs Terkel called "a Monday through Friday kind of dying.

Because competence-building represents more cumulative learning than great leaps of inventiveness, it is difficult to "time compress" competence-building.

We don't know where we're going, but we're not going to stray from familiar paths.

In our company the trick is to change jobs in time to guarantee that the long-term pay-off you promised four years ago in your capital budget proposal becomes someone else's short-term performance target.

What's needed are radically new organizational models that downplay formal structure. In a world of relentless change, trade-offs need to be made as close to the front lines as possible. Boundaries must be malleable. Resources, rather than being hoarded, must flow unhindered toward promising opportunities. Interunit coordination must be the product of nimble, self-organizing communities and market-like transactions rather than blanket policies or cumbersome councils.

As an organization grows, layers get added, staff groups swell, rules proliferate, and compliance costs mount. Once a company hits a certain threshold of complexity—around two hundred to three hundred employees, in our experience—bureaucracy starts growing faster than the organization itself.

dismantling bureaucracy means dismantling traditional power structures. As you may have noticed, people with power are typically reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. This is a serious impediment, since there's no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.

FIGURE 2-1 US employment in occupations based on importance of originality to job performance

Contrary to conventional wisdom, what makes a job low skilled is not the nature of the work it entails, or the credentials required, but whether or not the people performing the task have the opportunity to grow their capabilities and tackle novel problems. The most important lesson to be gleaned from post-bureaucratic pioneers is that it's possible to radically upskill what would otherwise be regarded as low-skilled jobs

The vanguard companies offer better-than-average wages, not because they're unusually generous, but because their employees create exceptional value. There's a deep conviction in these organizations that when "ordinary" employees are given the chance to learn, grow, and contribute, they'll achieve extraordinary results. Over time, this conviction produces a workforce that's deeply knowledgeable, endlessly inventive, and ardently customer focused.

Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.