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Gary Hamel: American Management Expert

In their book, "Competing for the Future", which came out in 1995. Hamel and Prahalad start off by pointing out that you can improve your results in two ways: by cutting your costs, or by increasing your outputs.
In their book, "Competing for the Future", which came out in 1995. Hamel and Prahalad start off by pointing out that you can improve your results in two ways: by cutting your costs, or by increasing your outputs.

But too many companies focus on the cost-cutting. So why don't people concentrate more on the output than the costs? Because their strategic vision is too narrow. It is defined by what the competition is doing.

It is, says Hamel, important to think about what is NOT there. That done, you need a strategy for doing something about it. A "Strategic Intent", forces one to think beyond the present and to contemplate new worlds.

Being different is really the theme of Gary's latest book, called "Leading the Revolution".  Most importantly of all he talks about the "grey-haired revolutionaries" - the companies that reinvent themselves time and time again. Anyone can have one great new idea or vision, very few can keep on doing it.
This is how Hamel's 10 requirements go:

1. Have Unreasonable Expectations
2. Make your business definition elastic, don't get fixated on one vision 3. Have a cause, not a business
4. Listen to other voices: young people, newcomers, outsiders
5. Keep an open market for ideas, don't shut anyone up
6. Have an open market for capital, allow people to bid for funds to support experiments
7. Have an open market for talent, so that people are allowed to work in areas that excite them
8. Encourage low risk experimentation
9. The principle of cellular revolution: breaking the organization down into small groups so that a failed revolution won't damage the whole organization
10. Allow personal wealth accumulation.Successful ideas should make money for the people who came up with them

Nevertheless, as Hamel agrees, you need both revolution AND luck to succeed in an uncertain world.

Biography:

Gary Hamel taught at London Business School for ten years. But he knew that if he was really to going to help companies build new capabilities, he would have to become more than an "armchair theorist."

So it was that in the summer of 1993 Hamel flew to Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, where it was all happening, and founded Strategos - his consulting company.

In his work with world leading companies such as Shell, Nokia, CGU, Ford and others, Professor Hamel and his colleagues at Strategos have helped management teams create rule-breaking strategies that have generated billions of dollars in new wealth.

He still keeps a couple of toes in the academic world, with Visiting Professorships at London and Harvard, but his attention is now focused on the leaders of business, rather than those who study it.

Although Hamel still holds a faculty appointment with the London Business School, he resides in Woodside, California.

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