Customer Reviews

The Future of Management

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When you write a book about the future of management, there are bound to be high expectations. When that book is written by one of the more celebrated management thinkers, those expectations go even higher. With that said and recognizing that it is hard to argue with success and stature. I have to say that this book left me flat. Hammel's Future of Management is a continuation on his 2000 work Leading the Revolution (LTR) which combined high impact statements with high design that reflected the height of the internet era. In many ways, the Future of Management is a more somber continuation of the ideas in LTR.

The first section of the book poses a powerful question in terms of what comes next for management innovation. That is followed by an explanation of the importance of management innovation over operational, product and strategic innovation. The section challenges the reader to first imagine, and then invent the future of management. A noble task and one that the author tries to address but unfortunately does not deliver on to the degree that you would expect.

The second section of the book highlights a few case studies such as Whole Foods, WL Gore, and Google. The cases are well written and unabashedly positive highlighting few of the challenges and setbacks people might face in this journey. A few, even anonomyous failures would have been much more illustrative of the concepts Hamel is advocating.

The third and final section is perhaps the best part of the book as it starts to set up some ideas on what future managers and management might look like. Here the results unfortunately are what you might expect, to paraphrase - the future of management will look much like the internet. OK, but I have heard that before from others. Some of the most insightful parts of this section include: the notion of separating what from how, the idea of management DNA and motivation, and the key challenges he poses in terms of the challenges for the future of management. These challenges hearken back to Leading the Revolution and include:

Challenge 1 - Creating a democracy of ideas
Challenge 2 - Amplifying human imagination
Challenge 3 - Dynamically reallocating resources
Challenge 4 - Aggregating collective wisdom
Challenge 5 - Minimizing the drag of old mental models
Challenge 6 - Giving everyone a chance to opt in

The fourth section concentrates on IBM's Emerging Business Opportunities or EBO process and how the company was able to reignite its growth engine by managing new growth initiatives and taking R&D to the market. It's an interesting case study and a good way to wrap up the book.

The future of management is an ok book, more like a toned down east coast consumable version of leading the revolution. This is a book for thinkers rather than practioners. This is one of the reasons why it is not a 5 star rating from me. Hamel attempts to be somewhat Druckeresque, if that is a word, but does not pull off the deep systematic thinking that Peter Drucker did so well. Pushing this analogy, the style of The Future of Management is 80% Drucker and 20% Tom Peters. For me, Hamel's groundbreaking work is still Competing for the Future. If you are a fan of Leading the Revolution or a fan of Hamel you will buy this book and like it. If you are a reader studying the issues and challenges of management you will find that Hamel raises more questions than he answers and that many of the answers are ones that are already out there in the marketplace.

There is an old Arab proverb: "He who speaks about the future lies even when he tells the truth".
The author makes some good points, particularly when discussing the corrosive affect of calcified corporate cultures on employee morale. But he extends his examples of Google, WL Gore and Whole Foods too far. What works for them might not work for other companies. He never makes this distinction (nor tells the reader how to identify it) and he falls into the trap of missing the difference between cause and effect (see the excellent book "The Halo Effect" to learn more about this all too common tendency amongst business management authors).
He gives some good examples of how technology can break down barriers inside of a company, such as internet enabled 'predictive markets' and their ability to help with m&a strategy. But then he goes on to suggest that company sponsored blogs where employees can vent their feelings about their employer (anonymously) might make for a healthier, more innovative workplace. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't think this would go over too well in most workplaces.
But the real reason I can give only one star is that he never mentions the impact of different cultures on management styles. This is a gross oversight. What works in the US might not work in China, Brazil or India. I was surprised that someone writing a book with the bold title "The Future of Management" could completely overlook such an important topic, especially when our economy is becoming much more global. I would strongly suggest caution if one were to implement some of his strategies.

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?

Through this book, Gary Hamel goes after all the sacred cows of management: all the bureaucratic practices that have been built up over the past 100 years starting with the "scientific management" theories in the early 20th century. He makes a compelling argument that the most innovative companies of the 21st century are going to be the ones that will innovate their management practices. These practices include the planning processes, the budgeting processes, the hiring processes, the incentive and performance management processes. And, he backs it with examples of companies that are leading the way: Whole Foods, Gore and Google. Then based upon these companies and others (e.g. Toyota), he defines some principles of the future of management - a workplace that is as democratic as the countries that the corporation exists in today. And, why shouldn't that occur? Why shouldn't the same democratic principles that the average corporation thrives on be provided to the people who work there? Needless to say, there will be a lot of conflict on the way to this management philosophy, but the companies who get there first will be able to draw the talent in the future, just like Google is doing today. And that will probably be the reason that some of today's dinosaur organizations will be dragged kicking and screaming into 21st century management - or just like the dinosaur become obsolete.

Gary Hamel is a Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management of the London Business School, co-Founder of international consulting company Strategos and Director of the Management Innovation Lab. He is the author of several business books, such as Leading the Revolution, Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and numerous articles for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and other class-leading publications. This book was published in 2007, consists of 4 parts and a total of 11 chapters. Hamel's books are never boring and this one is almost as radical as `Leading the Revolution'. This fact is highlighted in Hamel's introduction of the goal of this book: "My goal is to help you become a 21st-century management pioneer; to equip you to reinvent the principles, processes, and practices of management for our postmodern age."

The three chapters of Part I explain why management innovation matters, whereby the author argues that modern-day management has evolved rapidly in the first half of the 20th century but that the "technology" of management has now reached a local peak rather than a 8,000 metres Himalaya monster. "In fact, most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War." In the second chapter, Hamel explains management innovation: "Put simply, management innovation changes the way managers do what they do, and also does so in a way that enhances organizational performance." Chapter 3 proposes an agenda for management innovation, whereby one is "going to need a passion for some very specific, very noble challenge" in order to invent the future of management. It is "a passion for solving extraordinary problems that creates the potential for extraordinary accomplishment."

Part II - Management Innovation in Action's chapters 4, 5 and 6 explain Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore and Google as examples of management innovators. This part serves the author's goal "to demonstrate that it really is possible to defy management orthodoxy and still run a successful business; that you can flout conventional management wisdom and still ship products on time, satisfy exacting customers, and deliver mouthwatering results. Turns out, we haven't reached the end of management. We really can reinvent the way big companies are structured and run. ... So no more excuses. It's time for you to buckle down and start inventing the future of management."

In the first chapter of Part III - Imaging the Future of Management, we come across the search for better ways to emancipate and compound human capability, whereby all of these searches start with simplest of all questions, Why? In Chapter 7 Hamel introduces five key design rules for building companies that are fit for the future. "... the task of reinventing management for the 21st century is going to take time. But what you can and must do is to get your colleagues thinking and talking about the opportunity to reinvent your company's management DNA." The next chapter introduces some new management principles, which combine big ideas with the power to inspire dramatic changes in tradition-bound processes and practices. Chapter 9 concludes this part and helps you extract maximum value out of your journey to the fringe. The author introduces 6 questions for this purpose.

The first chapter of Part 4 - Building the Future of Management recaps the 9 rules for management innovators. The final chapter introduces the 5 essential building blocks for management innovation, whereby the goal [of management of innovation] is for companies to gain a performance advantage by first amplify and then aggregate human effort. Hamel concludes this book with: "Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millennium won't be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations."

Yes, I do like this book. It is just like the other books (co-)written by Gary Hamel and challenges the reader. This book in particular requires the reader to have a good look at existing management and business practices and see whether these can be done in a radical new innovative manner. But be warned, this exercise to reinvent management for the 21st century is going to take time and can probably best be started through thinking and talking with colleagues. Recommended to all looking for new ways to do business and manage.

I just finished Gary Hamel's latest book, The Future of Management. It is absolutely the most inspiring business book I have ever read. Hamel accurately makes the case that management theory has hardly evolved in the past 50 years. There are plenty of reasons why, but the heart of the problem is that restructuring the organization must go through senior executives who are (a) afraid of change, (b) unfamiliar with innovative approaches, and (c) unwilling to relinquish the command and control power they have so deliberately "earned." So it is, quite literally, business as usual.

The book carefully dissects examples of companies that have dared to take a radically different approach and been rewarded with extraordinary results. Gore, Whole Foods and Google were all born from visionary founders who were unburdened by history, dogma or business school educations. And even the changes that Lou Gerstner at IBM or A.G. Lafley at P&G were compelled to make are illustrative of the possibilities for gradual transformation in even the most traditional corporate behemoths.

I experimented with some of these principles as a CEO, but never had the vision to jump in the deep end. As a result of The Future of Management, I now see how much more powerful, innovative, effective and personally fulfilling businesses can be. This is a must read for those executives who are not too timid to shy away from redesigning the organization.
Bill Aho
www.atclevel.typepad.com

I read a great book called, The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.

I found the book to be very well written. I read a lot of business books and many of them are not that well written; however, I still like the books if they are well laid out and organized so often report favourably on them. Gary Hamel is a good writer in addition to having good thoughts.

Part One of the book is where Gary challenges us to think. I was contemplating writing an article before I read the book on, "The Power of Excess Resources", or "Is It Possible to be Too Efficient?"

Here is what Gary Hamel has to say:

Contrary to popular mythology, the thing that most impedes innovation in large companies is not a lack of risk taking. Big companies take big, and often imprudent, risks every day. The real brake on innovation is the drag of old mental models. Long-serving executives often have a big chunk of their emotional capital invested in the existing strategy.

In the pursuit of efficiency, companies have wrung a lot of slack out of their operations. Thatâ(tm)s a good thing. No one can argue with the goal of cutting inventory levels, reducing working capital, and slashing overhead. The problem, though, is that if you wring all the slack out of a company, youâ(tm)ll wring out all of the innovation as well. Innovation takes time â" time to dream, time to reflect, time to learn, time to invent, and time to experiment. And it takes uninterrupted time - time when you can put your feet up and stare off into space.

In section one he also explains what a huge percentage of people are not fully engaged in their work at all levels of the company. As English novelist, Ian Forster said, "A person with passion is better than 40 people merely interested."

He also talked about too much management with too little freedom. The gist of that message is that often managers are over-managed.

Part Two moves into a series of stories about real businesses and real people including: Whole Foods, Goretex, and Google.

One thing that I donâ(tm)t like about many authors is when they talk about company success stories, they tend to attribute success to some characteristic they point out when I think they may have pointed out the wrong characteristic so there might not be a link with success. I also note that every circumstance is different at any different time so it is very difficult to take one solution and apply it to another circumstance. Unfortunately, we all still need to think.

Part Three talks about our beliefs. Sometimes our past success can lead to future failure. It is all about change.

One thing I particularly like about this part is a chapter on Learning from the Fringe which basically points out that many of the better ideas and innovations might not come from the existing business or even the existing managers. They often come from the fringes of the organization or the fringe of the business they do.

In Part Four â" The Building of the Future of Management, talks about management 2.0 and what will the new management look like and how to become effective.

This book was thoroughly enjoyable and I would highly recommend it to any leader.

Hamel challenges the underlying assumptions of current management practices and argues convincingly that the future of management may be less management or at least a different kind of management.

Hamel demonstrates that it is possible for a business to be highly profitable, continously innovative, and enable a positive people environment. Hamel teaches us how to create environments in big organizations where we enable entrepreneurial behavior from employees at all levels.

Hamel challenges us to examine the assumptions about employees which underly most management principles and to ask whether those assumptions are as valid today.

This book should challenge your beliefs and will be a good annual read for all of us. A keeper.

Its a great book for people who are into management or for students in college which I am. I found the reading to be interesting and easy. Gave you a better understanding of how Google, Whole Food, etc. operates. Well written.

This has just surpassed 'E-Myth' as my favorite book on business management and has made it impossible to read a 'traditional' management book or article in the same light as before. It was recommended to me by an instructor in a business process re-engineering class and my mind has been spinning with the possibilities since the first chapter. It meshes with my own perspective of the 'right' way to manage people and I am sure that influences my opinion, but it builds an excellent case for the 'maverik' business models of companies like Whole Foods, Google and Gore. If I have to give a criticism, it is full of thought provoking theory, but short on 'how to'. If you think bureaucracy is killing the productivity and creativity of your company, read this book.