Customer Rating: 
Summary: Provocative and Inspirational
Comment: Gary Hamel is one of the world's leading thinkers on business strategy. In this important and ambitious work he reviews current management methods and condemns them as relics of a bygone age. Using case studies including Whole Foods, W L Gore and Google, he argues for a new system of management that is empowering and democratic. His writing style is clear and cogent. The book is easy to read and will stimulate your thinking. It is highly recommended for anyone interested in innovation, leadership and strategy.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Hamel does it again
Comment: I have always been impressed with the writings of Prof Hamel and his work with Prahalad. This book wont let you down. Its thoughtful and reflective and the use of case studies are interesting. Hamel continues to develop his assertion that professional managers can suffer from a `management frame' and identifies how they can overcome this. Its great to read book that is about management and not this on-going media obession with entrepreneurship. Excellent organisations require highly skilled,thoughtful and reflective managers. This book will help all managers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book on innovation and on desirable management culture
Comment: I recently came across this fascinating new book by Gary Hamel in the course of my investigation of Agile.
It's perhaps the best book I've read on innovation - and the best book I've read on desirable management culture. It's a real joy to read.
I'll cast my vote any day for the kind of pro-innovation pro-enablement management culture Hamel describes. It's the approach that has great potential to motivate key employees.
It includes chapters on the remarkable management cultures at Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex etc), and a small little upstart called Google.
Here's a quote from around 20% of the way in: "if you want to capture the economic high ground in the creative economy, you need employees who are more than acquiescent, attentive, and astute - they must also be zestful, zany, and zealous. So we must ask: what are the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving this state of organisational bliss?"
The rest of the book provides answers to this question.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A guide to new ideas in management
Comment: This is a well-wrought, ambitious and fascinating book. For these reasons, and for its specific suggestions about how to produce management innovation, we recommend it to anyone who is interested in innovation, in managing for innovation, and in how management is changing. Gary Hamel's ambition is impressive. He works with the idea of the paradigm shift developed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Hamel applies Kuhn's concept to management, arguing persuasively for the need to change managerial theories and practices. Where Hamel's study directs you for inspiration is particularly fascinating. How many authors suggest modeling management on Google, evolutionary biology and religion (to name but three examples)? While his examples of organizations that practice management innovation do differ from the industrial-age norm he wants to displace, some of his concepts are not as revolutionary as others, nor as radical as a paradigm shift might mandate. After all, many other experts have already suggested that hierarchical, top-down management may stifle innovation. Nonetheless, Hamel's book fulfills most of its ambitions. It is wide-ranging and quite useful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An invaluable "guide to inventing tomorrow's best practices today"
Comment:
As he clearly indicates in his earlier books, notably in Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and then in Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel's mission in life is to exorcise "the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management" so that decision-makers can free themselves from what James O'Toole aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." In his Preface to this volume, written with Bill Breen, Hamel asserts that "today's best practices aren't good enough" and later suggests that he wrote this book for "dreamers and doers" who want to invent "tomorrow's best practices today." In this brilliant book, he explains how to do that.
In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who read my review to get a "taste." Here is a representative selection of Hamel's insights:
"To thrive in an increasingly disruptive world, companies must become as strategically adaptable as they are operationally efficient. To safeguard their margins, they must become gushers of rule-breaking innovation. And if they're going to out-invent and outthink as growing mob of upstarts, they must learn how to inspire their employees to give the very best of themselves every day. These are the challenges that must be addressed by 21st-century management innovators." (Page 11)
"Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a particularly grave threat to timely renewal. The first is the tendency of management teams to deny or ignore the need for a strategy reboot. The second is a dearth of compelling alternatives to the status quo, which often leads to strategic paralysis. And the third: allocational rigidities that make it difficult to deploy talent and capital behind new initiatives. Each of these barriers stands in the way of zero-trauma change; hence each deserves to be a focal point for management innovation." (Page 44)
"Skepticism and humility are important attributes for a management innovator - yet they're not enough. To create space for management innovation you will need to systematically deconstruct the management orthodoxies that bind you and your colleagues to new possibilities. Here's how to get started. Pick a big management issue like change, innovation, or employee engagement, and then assemble 10 or 20 of your colleagues. Ask each of them to write down ten things they believe about the nominated problem. Have them inscribe each belief on a Post-it note. Then plaster the stickies on a wall and group similar beliefs together." Then sustain a rigorous discussion during which all premises and assumptions are challenged. "To escape the straitjacket of conventional thinking, you have to be able to distinguish between beliefs that describe the world as it is, and describe the world as it is and must forever remain." Focus on what can be changed...and should be changed. (Pages 130-131)
I especially appreciate Hamel's analysis of three exemplary companies: Whole Foods Market (a "community of purpose"), W.L. Gore (an "innovation democracy"), and Google ("brink-of-chaos management"). Hamel focuses his attention to how these companies invent tomorrow's best practices today. He cleverly juxtaposes a "management innovation challenge" with each company's "distinctive management practices." Having established and then sustained a one-on-one rapport with his reader throughout the narrative, Hamel makes it crystal clear that that he is not urging his reader to address the same challenges and develop the same best practices for any one of the three exemplary companies, much less emulate all three. That would be insane.
"There isn't any law that prevents large organizations from being engaging, innovative, and adaptive - and mostly bureaucracy free. Even better, it really is possible to set the human spirit free at work. So no more excuses. It's time for you to buckle down and start inventing the future of management...My goal in writing this book was not to predict the future of management but to help you invent it...From the first time since the dawning of the industrial age, the only way to build a company that's fit for the future is to build one that is fit for human beings as well."
So, there's Gary Hamel's challenge: Start your own "revolution" and lead it. If you don't, who will?
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