Product Description

What fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation—new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. Through history, management innovation has enabled companies to cross new performance thresholds and build enduring advantages.

In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century—centered on control and efficiency—no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management.

Hamel explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, revealing:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4848 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-09
• Released on: 2007-09-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Though this authoritative examination of today's static corporate management systems reads like a business school treatise, it isn't the same-old thing. Hamel, a well-known business thinker and author (Leading the Revolution), advocates that dogma be rooted out and a new future be imagined and invented. To aid managers and leaders on this mission, Hamel offers case studies and measured analysis of management innovators like Google and W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), then lists lessons that can be drawn from them. He doesn't gloss over how difficult it will be to reinvent management, comparing the new and needed shift in thinking to Darwin's abandoning creationist traditions and physicists who had to look beyond Newton's clockwork laws to discover quantum mechanics. But the steps needed to make such a profound shift aren't clearly outlined here either. The book serves primarily as an invitation to shed age-old systems and processes and think differently. There's little humor and few punchy catchphrases—the book has less sparkle than Jeffrey Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking?—but its content will likely appeal to managers accustomed to b-school textbooks and tired of gimmicky business evangelism. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
If companies now innovate by creating new products or new business models...why can t they do the same in how they manage organizations? --The New York Times, December 30, 2007

Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life...Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work. --Fortune, September 19, 2007

There's much here that will resonate with forward-thinking managers. --BusinessWeek, October 8, 2007

About the Author
Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School and Director of the Management Innovation Lab. He is the author of Leading the Revolution and coauthor of Competing for the Future.

Customer Reviews

There is a problem in Management!
Organizations are top heavy. Something needs to be done about it. The future of management is about giving everyone the opportunity to say, "This is not going to happen anymore". Be brave and make change in your organization.

The Future is What You Will Make It
This is an interesting book. While the title says "The Future of Management," the book is about more than just management. It is also about change, change as it impacts an organization's development and resilience/adaptability. This book uses a wide ranging definition of management and management processes.

In today's Web 2.0 environment, Gary Hamel argues that our current command - control type of management practices are actually toxic to organizational success and excellence. Hamel argues that what is needed today is management innovation or Management 2.0. He sees management innovation being needed in the areas of managing talent, allocating resources, organization structural design and the building of operational strategies.

If you are looking for a prescriptive answer to future of management, this book is not for you. Rather than offer his own prescription, Hamel has chosen instead to offer the reader/manager a series of questions throughout the book. Questions designed to help you, the reader, think about the type of management innovations needed within your own organization. Questions designed to help you mold your thinking about the management philosophy and practices you can use within your organization to successfully compete and thrive in the future.

If there is a fault with the book, I would say it lies in the examples Hamel uses to illustrate his key points. I wish he had used more examples (if they even exist) from the more traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic type organizations in existence today, rather than those organizations specifically created from the beginning as innovative type organizations.

Want a Competitive Edge? Change Your Management
Hamel makes a compelling argument in pointing out the lack of innovation that has occurred to our fundamental management principles constructed well over half a century ago. While technology and the speed of business have rapidly changed in the past fifty years, the way companies are organized and managed has not. This is problematic because, like with anything else, there must be change and innovation for companies to continue to be successful. The book points out several examples of top companies that have redefined the role of management in the twenty-first century. Companies such as W.L. Gore, Google and Whole Foods have taken untraditional management approaches and have turned them into money-making endeavors. The practices of each of these companies should be a template for tailoring a new management style for any company in any industry.

This book is relevant because there is no loyalty anymore, especially among the younger generations that grew up with the Internet. On the Internet, no hierarchies exist, capability and not titles matter and everyone has a voice and is free to define themselves. In short, Hamel argues that management 2.0 looks a lot like web 2.0 where people voluntary choose how to spend their time and change the world in doing so. I have to agree. The days of the successful company filled with subservient employees commuting to work to be neither asked nor expected to contribute any new ideas, let alone innovate, are over given that the same employee is free to post his own thoughts online, comment on the millions of blogs out there and voluntarily add to open source projects in his free time. Companies that want a competitive edge in the years to come must understand this. Let's hope this book is widely read and that the lightbulb goes on for many of the bureaucrats out there still stuck in management 1.0.