Quotes from Gary Hamel

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. "We were trying to run the company by remote control," he recalls. "We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

Put simply, hyper-rational executives produce hyper-boring products.

How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can't requisition a $ 300 office chair without a manager's approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we'd realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual's freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.

Yet "change management," like "Scottish cuisine" and "man bun," is an oxymoron.

Unfortunately, the premise that employees are incapable of exercising judgment tends to be self-validating. First, jobs stripped of interesting cognitive work are unlikely to attract individuals looking to exercise their problem-solving skills. Second, overly scripted jobs give employees little opportunity to disprove the bureaucratic hypothesis that acumen correlates with rank. And third, after living for a few months in a reign of rules, most employees will quit or mentally check out.

As human beings, we are resilient, inventive, and exuberant. The fact that our organizations are not suggests that in some important ways, they are less human than we are. Ironically, it seems that human-built organizations have scant room for exactly those things that make us furless bipeds special—things like courage, intuition, love, playfulness, and artistry.

That's the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isn't transformational and what's transformational doesn't seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.

We live in a world of accelerating change, where the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. Change is unrelenting, pitiless, and occasionally shocking.

With every crisis, authority moves to the center, and stays there. And as bureaucracy grows stronger, those who might resist it grow weaker.

Fact is, we're change addicts. We have an insatiable appetite for the new. All those changes that are roiling our world, they're our doing. We are the agents of upheaval. Unlike human beings, organizations are pretty much crap at change. That's why incumbents so often find themselves on the back foot. Today, we expect the newcomers to beat the geezers.

We are defined by the causes we serve. Our identity is discovered in the challenges we embrace. However modest our means and finite our capabilities, we can gift ourselves the exhilaration of a noble quest. Thankfully, there are plenty of deserving problems to go around—like building machines that think, reducing CO2 emissions, overcoming racial disharmony, combating drug-resistant superbugs, ending human trafficking, and building habitats on other planets.

Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently

the world is becoming more turbulent faster than most companies are becoming more adaptable.

Throughout the long history of social progress, the most powerful argument for change has been the assertion that every human being deserves the fullest possible opportunity to develop, apply, and benefit from their natural gifts, and that unnecessary human-made impediments to this quest are unjust. That is why we stand against bureaucracy: because human beings deserve better.

In practice, organizational change tends to be either trivial or traumatic. Every day, companies refresh products and improve processes with little drama. Strategic pivots, by contrast, tend to be convulsive, not unlike the uprisings that occasionally concuss poorly governed dictatorships.

Given these dynamics, companies that fall behind tend to stay there.

Sadly, senescent companies can't be euthanized. Instead, semi-comatose, they hang on, closing facilities, killing brands, throttling R&D, shedding staff, merging with lethargic rivals, and lobbying for regulatory help. These are "treadmill companies," and there are more of them than you think.

As you'd expect of a company built to encourage creative problem-solving, Nucor is highly decentralized. In essence, the company is a confederation of seventy-five divisions that operate independently but compete collectively.

a capacity for innovation is the hallmark of our species. Each of us was born to create—whether it's landscaping a garden, writing a blog, composing a photograph, inventing a recipe, developing an app, or starting a business.

When we're in the thrall of a healthy passion, we experience a magical melding of effort and enjoyment. Formidable obstacles become intriguing puzzles, and minor wins, badges of accomplishment. We are most alive when we're doing something that enchants us. Sadly, for most people, that something isn't found at work.

Initiative, creativity, and valor can't be commanded.

There's no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink's Drive, the formula hasn't changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.

The engagement deficit isn't about what people do at work, but how they're managed. In Gallup's research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee's boss.