Product Description

Gary Hamel, world-renowned business thinker and coauthor of Competing for the Future, the book that set the management agenda for the 1990s, now delivers an agenda for the twenty-first century with the national bestseller, Leading the Revolution. Fully revised with a new introduction, this book provides an action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming and staying an industry revolutionary. Hamel argues that the fundamental challenge companies face is reinventing themselves and their industries, not just in times of crisis-but continually.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154595 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

Synopsis
Gary Hamel, world-renowned business thinker and coauthor of "Competing for the Future", the book that set the management agenda for the 1990s, now delivers an agenda for the twenty-first century with the national bestseller, "Leading the Revolution". Fully revised with a new introduction, this book provides an action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming and staying an industry revolutionary. Hamel argues that the fundamental challenge companies face is reinventing themselves and their industries, not just in times of crisis - but continually.

About the Author
Gary Hamel is a founder and chairman of Strategos, and Visiting Professorof Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. He is the co-author of the international bestseller, Competing for the Future.

Customer Reviews

An Operations Manual for Corporate Revolutionaries

Note: I read this book when it was first published and recently re-read it prior to reading Hamel's latest book, The Future of Management in which he provides a "guide to inventing tomorrow's best practices today." How well have the core concepts in Leading the Revoluton held up? Very well. In fact, they are even more relevant today. Hamel develops several of them in much greater depth in The Future of Management which I also highly recommend.

Hamel is among the most insightful analysts of the contemporary business world. If you and/or your organization needs to be energized (or re-energized), this book is "must reading" ASAP. But a word of caution: The cohesive and comprehensive program Hamel presents is NOT for the faint of heart nor for dimwits.
In his Preface, he tells us "This is a book about innovation -- not in the usual sense of new products and new technologies, but in the sense of radical new business models. It begins by laying out the revolutionary imperative: we've reached the end of incrementalism, and only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy. It then provides a detailed blueprint of what you [italics] can do to get the revolution started in your own company. Finally, it describes in detail an agenda for making innovation as ubiquitous a capability as quality or customer service. Indeed, my central argument is that radical innovation the [italics] competitive advantage for the new millennium."

The material is carefully organized as follows:

Part I Facing Up to the Revolution

Part II Finding the Revolution

Part III Igniting the Revolution

Part IV Sustaining the Revolution

Hamel concludes with these remarks: "I began this book with a simple observation -- that for the first time in history, our heritage is no longer our destiny. Our dreams are no longer fantasies but possibilities. There isn't a human being who has ever lived who right now, at this moment so pregnant with promise. Among all your forebears, among the countless generations who had no hope of progress, among all those whose spirits were betrayed by progress, you are the one who now stands on the threshold of -- the age of revolution. You are blessed beyond belief. Don't falter. Don't hesitate. You were given the opportunity for a reason. Find it. Lead the revolution."

If you and/or your organization are in the doldrums, this is "must reading." But be forewarned: As Hamel explains so carefully, being a revolutionary is to be exposed to constant perils. If you are a dimwit or faint of heart, don't bother to read this book because it was not written for you. Rather, it was written for many of those with whom you compete: People with courage and principle. People who are prudent but passionate risk-takers. Those who are determined to make a difference. Those who understand the challenges which the future offers...and will pounce on them with zeal and elan.

leading the revolution is a stunning achievement.

OK but not as good as others
From the co-author of Competing for the Future and chairman of Strategos, this was one of the best selling books of 2000. Using examples including Cisco, Virgin and (unfortunately with hindsight) Enron, this is a rally cry for companies to look for the radical and not the incremental as they seek to lead their sectors.

Extending to the Limits of Imagination!
Leading the Revolution is an important book of business scholarship. It proposes a higher standard for companies: Constantly establishing and superbly implementing improved business models for customer interfaces, core strategy, using strategic resources, and value networks. Further, it integrates the arguments of many leading thinkers about improvement methods into one set of procedures for making faster business progress. The book also makes an excellent case for this higher standard already being in operation in companies like Enron (which has obviously turned out to be a poor choice for an example), GE Capital, Cisco Systems, Nokia (which is having problems now) and Charles Schwab.

To those who have already are familiar with the literature of developing new business models (such as Digital Capital), little in this book will be new. For those who are very focused on gradual improvement, the arguments here will be foreign and puzzling. Because of Gary Hamel's stature, many will read this book and begin to grasp the changed nature of the leadership and management challenges of the 21st century. Because of ways the argument is articulated and illustrated, many more will miss the point. That's too bad.

Basically, Hamel is arguing that the kinds of changes that most people think of as revolutionary need to become everyday occurrences. This observation is based on an accelerating rate of uncontrollable change and resulting opportunities for innovation; an economic environment where fewer companies prosper while more become mediocre or below average; more pressure for performance from investors; rapidly developing business skills in business process, product, market and model innovation; broad human potential to imagine more and make it happen; and potential for improved communication and application of innovation.

As a strategist, he does an excellent job of outlining the key issues of these factors, and how to organize an enterprise to accomplish more with these opportunities. By providing an analytical context for understanding the phenomena, he helps others understand what he describing intellectually. For those who have not had these experiences, the descriptions will seem to be alien emotionally.

The book is designed to be a clone of Tom Peters' more flamboyantly-conceived works like The Circle of Innovation. The language is extreme, often bordering on being vulgar, and will make many people uncomfortable. That appears to be Hamel's purpose. The pages are laid out in vivid colors, photographs and graphics making it seem unlike most business books you have read before. This will make the book seem even stranger to many. That also appears to be Hamel's purpose. The downside of this approach is that many will simply reject the message along with the way it is presented. That's a missed opportunity on Hamel's part and on the reader's part. The message is more important and serious than the presentation.

On the other hand, I would like to give the editors at Harvard Business School Press credit for being flexible in working with Hamel to create the presentation of this book.

The book's biggest weakness is in using Revolution as the metaphor. Any student of revolutions will quickly tell you that revolutions usually lead to counter revolutions after a period of maximum turmoil. That's not what Hamel is talking about, so his metaphor will confuse many while annoying others who do not want to turn their organizations into revolutionary bands. He doesn't seem to mean to invoke Revolution in either sense, but he never makes that point clear.

The second biggest weakness is that he presents a new paradigm that is very complex and requires mastering vast quantities of new skills for most people. Many readers will be overwhelmed by the prospect. So if they hear Hamel as a herald, they may be discouraged about following the herald.

The third biggest weakness is drawing major conclusions from very limited data. For example, he asserts that companies that master this new paradigm will eventually end up taking over the assets of companies that do not, after getting their customers and top employees. He cites AOL's merger with Time Warner as his example of an asset takeover. Without going into a full analysis, that example does not fully match this argument. For example, Gerry Levin from Time Warner will be the surviving CEO. And there are few other examples where new model companies end up buying the assets of old model companies.

The fourth weakness is encouraging people to grasp the potential of powerful, underlying trends without giving them much help in understanding how to do this. That is a subject for an entire book, not just a few pages in one.

One surprise for many people will be that the book is aimed more at the rebels at lower levels in a company than at its formal leaders. The rebels will learn a lot about how to become more effective in pushing their new ideas. Those who think like the conventional wisdom will find much less guidance to help them. In fact, Hamel has a side bar about working as a consultant with Royal Dutch/Shell and the difficulties that people there had in coming up with new ideas until the consultants trained them. Conventional wisdom is based on very complicated psychological processes, and changing that conventional wisdom in useful ways is a subject well beyond the scope of a brief chapter.

You should think of this book as introducing the subject of constantly improving business models, and inviting others to follow and flesh it out. I look forward to future books by Gary Hamel and other leading thinkers in further developing the questions posed here.

While you contemplate an expanded purpose for business enterprises, you should also consider what other purposes should be added that Hamel has not addressed. Hamel's having posed such an important question should not stop us from trying to build even better ones.