Book Review: “The Future of Management”, Gary Hamel

By Gary Hamel

Reviewed by David L. Perkins

Everyone's looking to make a buck. Yes, money may not make you happy, but it sure greases the skids.

In the Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that your greatest hope for growing your organization and leading it to breakthrough success (and making a LOT of money) is to get out of the way. You're not going to lead your company to greatness. At least not enduringly. Your personal wisdom and creativity are just no match for the collective wisdom and creativity of a team of people charged with figuring out how to make your organization adapt, grow and succeed.

So quit trying to be the leader, savior and hero, and focus on developing a management model that:

• Attracts and retains a diverse pool of smart, talented people
• Gives its people the freedom to devise and test breakthrough ideas, innovations, strategies and methodologies
• Lets both employees (team members) and the marketplace determine which innovations get additional resources and which do not
• Allocates the spoils disproportionately to the individuals and teams that create the value

Hamel writes that the way businesses manage their employees (i.e., management models) has not evolved much in the past 100 years. Operating and business models have - such as the move to standardization of component parts and tasks, use of economies of scale (i.e., efficiencies garnered from volume), and control over costs through detailed cost accounting, have changed. But the way groups of people come together and are organized has not evolved much. The result is organizations that lack durability, adaptability and longevity.

The current management model, used by almost every business today - centered on control and efficiency - no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success.

To be sure, some companies are trying to find new and better management models. They're testing radical new ways to organize themselves and, in some cases, finding breakthrough success. Here's what we can learn from them:

• Hire bright, creative, motivated people from all disciplines
• Organize employees into near-autonomous teams that self-select who is on the team and what they work on
• Allow employees to spend up to 20% of their day on any project or idea they choose (so long as they disclose what it is and what progress is being made)
• Let employees and marketplace determine which ideas get initial and additional funding
• Share profits earned on new product with teams that create them

Radical, no doubt. Google's founders want a company that has "more swings of the bat per unit of time than anyone else in the world." More swings should translate into more singles, doubles, triples and home runs.

Hamel writes that businesses are organisms. They should be able to survive, adapt and thrive on their own, perpetually, so long as they are organized and "managed" in a way that allows this. But few businesses are so highly evolved. Business owners should seek to build organizations like the most adaptive organisms in the universe, namely, human beings and human civilizations/communities. Their defining characteristics are diversity, decentralized decision-making, experimentation, natural selection and survival of the fittest. Not command and control from the top.