The following is an excerpt from Gary Hamel's forthcoming book, What Matters Now , to be published in December 2011 by Jossey-Bass Business. In 1997 I bought an e-tablet from A.T. Cross, the pen company. Codeveloped with IBM, the CrossPad was hailed as a breakthrough product that would open up a...
One of the things that attracted me to Red Hat in the first place was that it was a company with a strong sense of purpose. Red Hat was a company full of believers, people who felt that the open source development model was simply a better way. During my first few months as CEO, I traveled to Red...
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." That chestnut has morphed from sales proposition to object lesson on the perils of clinging to convention in less than a generation. We've ditched the dark suits and "sincere" ties of our father's IBM for black turtlenecks and jeans, and we've embraced the "think different" ethos of Apple's celebrated campaign : "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes. The ones who see things differently."
One of the most important roles to fill when trying to build a passionate community is the storyteller . Edelman SVP Steve Rubel hit the nail on the head in a recent blog post entitled The Rise of the Corporate Transmedia Storyteller . From his post: -- "The reality is, however, that organizations...
This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed and on O'Reilly Radar . This tweet by Steve Case ( @stevecase ) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that...
What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out? Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global...
For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.
What leader today doesn't want more innovation? Yet, producing more (of anything) inside an organization generally leads to more process, which smothers individual creativity and all-too-often kills organizational innovation. Innovation isn't about structuring a process to lead to an outcome so much as it's about creating space—both elbow room, the space to roam free of bureaucratic rules and red tape, and head room, the freedom to see differently, think wildly, and aim higher. The leaders who generate more creative energy and innovation are always wrestling with the question: How do we design in more slack? Or, how do we cultivate an environment and support work that enlists people as drivers of their own destiny and inventors of the company's future?
About two years ago, I read a book called The Future of Management by Gary Hamel at the recommendation of some friends. I couldn’t put it down, devouring Gary’s three case studies of companies ( Google , Whole Foods , and W.L. Gore ) pushing aside 100+ years of management wisdom and charting their...
