Quotes from Gary Hamel

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.

Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns.

At the pinnacle of great design are products so gorgeous and lust-worthy that you want to lick them: a Porsche 911, Samsung's Luxia TV, an Eames lounge chair or anything by Loro Piana.

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.

It's not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it's that they no longer believe society's most powerful institutions are acting in their interests.

The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.

Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.

Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.

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.

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.

An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.

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

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.

Over time, a successful company will acquire much in the way of resources and momentum, and these things often insulate it from reality once it has stopped being successful.

Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.

If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.

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

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 it's pretty much the whole game today.

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

Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.