Book Review - Gary Hamel - The Future of Management

Written by David Hodes

Gary Hamel remains for me one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of management. His book “The Future of Management” goes boldly into the area of innovation of the practice of management itself. He asks if you can imagine the following:

• Employees rating their bosses and publishing the results online
• Inviting thousands of outsiders to help your company develop its strategy

• Abolish all titles and ranks
• Giving an employee the right to say no to any order or request
• Doing away with all controls on travel expenses
• Publishing the details of every employees salary and compensation package
• Blowing up the annual budgeting process

This radical agenda stems from a central hypothesis of Hamel that we are exiting the industrial age, begun in the late 18^th century, and with that exit we must unlearn the habits of managing people as if they were pieces of machinery and start the process of re-learning how to be fully human again. Harnessing the fullness of what it means to be a human and embracing all of our powers of creativity, insight, passion, intellect and will is the only way that people, companies and indeed countries will be able to adapt at a speed sufficient to be, as Hamel puts it, “as nimble as change itself”.

The first piece of the management innovation puzzle, according to Hamel, is to be far more adaptable. To do this, companies will have to get beyond denial about events that occur outside of the habitual frames of thinking. He quotes the example of how quickly the traditional record companies were caught out in their self deceptions about the ability of digital downloads to make money. He makes a passionate case for a far stronger capability to develop new strategic options that are enabled by an enhanced flexibility to redeploy talent and capital. It’s the first time I read the word “monopsony” in the context of a “monopsony for ideas” – that is the stifling situation in most businesses where there is only one place where you go for approval to get resources to turn ideas into value – and how that place is usually the furthest away from the marketplace (such as a head office) and deaf, dumb and blind to what is changing in the environment.

As in his book Leading the Revolution, Hamel continuously emphasises that innovation is everyone’s job, everywhere, all the time. He makes the point that the keys to becoming a revolutionary in innovation lies in the inspiration gained by bolstering human imagination, the openness to borrow ideas from elsewhere and the persistence to stay committed over time. It’s a question he maintains, of fully engaging the talents of every individual and destroying the prevailing myth that the trade-off between discipline and freedom is always a zero sum game. He argues cogently that to create real engagement, there must be greater freedom and a loosening of the reins of control. He continues his argument that in so doing, people have a heightened ability to connect to their authentic sense of purpose and desire to work to make a difference, which in turn, leads to a deeper sense of community, with an increased sense of belonging.

In Hamel’s future, management is tuned into solving really big questions and a culture is developed in which:

• Everyone gets heard
• Commitment is voluntary
• Power is granted from below
• The tools of creativity are widely distributed
• Capability counts for more than credentials and titles
• Individuals are richly empowered with information
• Authority is fluid and contingent on value-added
• Resources are free to follow opportunities
• Ideas compete on an equal footing
• Communities are self-defining
• Decisions are peer based

Check yourself and your company against this list – in Hamel’s book he shows how the likes of Google, Wholefoods, W.L. Gore, IBM and Semco amongst others are doing it.