“Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.”
- Gary Hamel
“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.”
“An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.”
“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.”
“Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.”
“Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.”
“A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.”
“In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.”
“If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.”
“Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.”
“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.”
