Leading the Revolution - Hardcover

Hamel, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578513324 ISBN 13: 9781578513321

Publisher: Harvard Business School Press

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

This text examines the underlying principles behind the radical innovation of companies and individuals. It explores and identifies the key criteria for building companies that are activist friendly and draws on examples of business activists who revolutionized their own firms.

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Review

This revolution business is exhausting work. Over Leading the Revolution's 300 pages, Gary Hamel, chairman of management consultancy Strategos, a London Business School visiting professor and research fellow at Havard, takes us on a whirlwind tour of the death of the corporation and the rise of the new economy. And it's breathless stuff too--"make innovation your enduring capability", "get off the treadmill of incrementation", and "heretics not prophets create revolutions". Hamel has not lost his touch in the years since his genre-defining Competing For the Future: he peppers his text with punchy prose, including the wonderful: "You can't use an old map to find new land."

Leading the Revolution begins by taking us through what Hamel describes as the End of Progress, whereby the evolution of industrial society is seen to be replaced by the revolution of the new economy. This change is underpinned by the rising expectations of the stakeholder economy: it is not enough to beat your last annual earnings, or be better than your competitor--the revolutionary company will be best of breed by every benchmark, nothing less. Failure to do so will leave you vulnerable to the other revolutionaries.

Hamel then sets about describing the road to becoming a revolutionary in your business and turning your business into a revolution. There are no great surprises here--think illogically, go against the grain, ask the wrong questions, be unreasonable in your expectations, it's a cause not a business, listen to the periphery. But taken together, his account builds into a vivid picture of can-do. The only trouble is that to act on even a fraction of his recommendations would exhaust the mightiest of managers. Perhaps that's why, in a revolution, there is only one leader--the rest of us just follow. --Chris Price