Why I’m a Gary Hamel Fan
No innovation guru turns a phrase like Gary Hamel. This is from his book, The Future of Management (2007):
If you’ve spent any time inside large organizations, you know that expecting them to be strategically nimble, restlessly innovative, or highly engaging places to work – or anything else than merely efficient – is like expecting a dog to do the tango.
His words stick to your ribs.
I have spent much of the past 20 years in business trying to find ways to innovate collaboratively across corporate borders. Like Edison and his light bulb, what I find is more and more ways to NOT innovate across borders. The world of business is fundamentally wired by the human “us/them” impulse to defeat these border crossings. And when we do manage it, we find that we have merely increased the dysfunction of one firm by an order of magnitude for every additional company we try to involve.
I will spend my life working this problem, and very likely I will find only more ways to NOT invent the light bulb of collaborative innovation. But we try, because I’m quite sure that the next answers to the World’s greatest challenges will come from the combination of insights, resources and capabilities currently trapped inside the stovepipes of today’s legally separate entities.
Keep inspiring us, Gary. And keep making us laugh.
An apt quote to say the least, but I’ll counter with “it may be like asking a dog to do the tango, but in doing the asking, you might find the dog does a damn decent foxtrot impression, and that is quite sufficient to get the whole ballroom dancing.”
I do a darn good impression of a golden retriever trying to dance whenever I attempt the foxtrot.