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GARY HAMEL

Who: “The world’s leading expert on business strategy,” according to BusinessWeek. He’s the coauthor of the influential book Competing for the Future, a professor of the London Business School, and the director of the California-based MLab, where he’s spearheading the pursuit of “moon shots for management”—a set of huge challenges to reform the theory and practice of running organizations.
Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “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.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.

Type I Insight: “The next time you’re in a meeting and folks are discussing how to wring another increment of performance out of your workforce, you might ask: ‘To what end, and to whose benefit, are our employees being asked to give of themselves? Have we committed ourselves to a purpose that is truly deserving of their initiative, imagination, and passion?’ ”
More Info: Hamel’s The Future of Management (written with Bill Breen) is an important read. For more on Hamel’s ideas and research, see www.garyhamel.com and www.managementlab.org.