Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Over time, a successful company will acquire much in the way of resources and momentum, and these things often insulate it from reality once it has stopped being successful. "

Related Quotes:

" I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not. "

Gary Hamel

Understand

Capitalism

" I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. "

" In most languages, 'control' is the first synonym for the word 'manage.' Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control, one must first constrain. "

" In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case. "

" To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous. "

" When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating. "

" It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value. "

" During the ten years I lived in the U.K., I frequently attended an Anglican church just outside of London. I enjoyed the energetic singing and the thoughtful homilies. And yet, I found it easy to be a pew warmer, a consumer, a back row critic. "

" While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders. "

" The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs. "

" It's not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it's that they no longer believe society's most powerful institutions are acting in their interests. "

" In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change. "

" To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions. "

" At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient. "

" I'm not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors. "

" All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths. "

" Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent. "

" Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path. "

" In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record - it's easy to discover who's in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don't appear on any organization chart. "

" A well-conceived product excels at what it does. It's close to being functionally flawless - like a Ziploc bag, a radio from Tivoli Audio, a Philips Sonicare toothbrush, a Nespresso coffee maker or Google's home page. "

" In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge. "

Gary Hamel

World

Companies

" Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane. "

" In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies. "

" We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation. "

" Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines. "

" Truth be told, there are lots of companies that provide exemplary phone support. DirecTV, Virgin America and Apple are a few that regularly exceed my expectations. "

" Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it's pretty much the whole game today. "

" Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy. "

" An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety. "

Gary Hamel

Insurance

Accomplishment

" As the great grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned, at last, that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanimity and our very souls demand something better, something different. "