Gary Hamel

Here’s what every federal agency needs to learn from the phenomenal success of Operation Warp Speed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/operation-warp-speed-trump-lessons/676913/?gift=KVo1IGImBY4xitCMiSFN24S58uJF1BwdKRJ3Mi97Nhw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

How did we become so inured to the inhumanity of our organizations? How is it OK that a scant 13% of employees around the world are emotionally engaged in their work? How is it OK that 70% of...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/busting-bureaucracy

There are many worthwhile challenges in the world: Reducing CO2 emissions, eradicating malaria, ending human trafficking and reducing income inequality, to name a few. But perhaps the noblest i...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/human-movement

We bet you hate bureaucracy as much as we do. Every day it squanders vast quantities of human initiative and imagination. It makes our organizations inertial and incremental. To change this,  ...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/bureaucratic-lunacy

We asked members of the HBR community to gauge the extent of “bureaucratic sclerosis” within their organization using our Bureaucracy Mass Index (BMI) tool. Here are our initial takeaways:

https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-we-learned-about-bureaucracy-from-7000-hbr-readers

Do you know how much bureaucracy is really costing your organization? It’s probably more than you think. Here’s how you can estimate your organization’s BMI. 

https://hbr.org/2017/05/assessment-do-you-know-how-bureaucratic-your-organization-is

In recent years American productivity growth has been anemic, averaging just 0.5% per year from 2010 to 2016. When productivity growth stagnates, so do incomes and living standards. As any econom...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/why-silicon-valley-doesnt-matter-much

More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational res...

https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year

Writing for the Harvard Business Review in 1988, Peter Drucker predicted that in 20 years the average organization would have slashed the number of management layers by half and shrunk its manag...

https://hbr.org/2016/07/more-of-us-are-working-in-big-bureaucratic-organizations-than-ever-before

Around the world, productivity growth has stalled out. While some hope that a “second machine age” will reverse the slump, we think that wringing bureaucracy out of the economy offers a more ...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/3-trillion

For all its enemies, bureaucracy is amazingly resilient. Since 1983, the number of managers, supervisors, and support staff employed in the U.S. economy has nearly doubled, while employment in ot...

https://hbr.org/2016/03/top-down-solutions-like-holacracy-wont-fix-bureaucracy

Can you think of any business topic that’s been hotter for longer than innovation? Trouble is, it’s hard to think of any business challenge where real pro­gress has been harder to come by. B...

https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-5-requirements-of-a-truly-innovative-company

Innovation starts with the heart—with a passion for improving the lives of those around you. When the iPad was introduced, Jony Ive, Apple’s head of design, talked about his passion for creat...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/heart-innovation

Pope Francis has made no secret of his intention to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic church, which he regards as insular, imperious, and bureaucratic. He understands...

https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-15-diseases-of-leadership-according-to-pope-francis

Large organizations of all types suffer from an assortment of congenital disabilities that no amount of incremental therapy can cure.  First, they are inertial.  They are frequently caught ou...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/reinventing-management-mashup-architecture-ideology

Almost 25 years ago in the pages of HBR, C.K. Prahalad and I urged managers to think in a different way about the building blocks of competitive success.  We argued that a business should be see...

https://hbr.org/2014/11/bureaucracy-must-die

Large organizations of all types suffer from an assortment of congenital disabilities that no amount of incremental therapy can cure. First, they are inertial. They are frequently caught out by t...

https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-core-incompetencies-of-the-corporation

Transformational-change initiatives have a dismal track record. In 1996, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter claimed that nearly 70 percent of large-scale change programs didn’t meet ...

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/build_a_change_platform_not_a_change_program

Over the past 20 years, nothing has transformed business as thoroughly or as frequently as information technology. In the first wave, advances in IT prompted many companies to revamp their operat...

http://fortune.com/2014/03/10/the-next-tech-revolution-busting-bureaucracy/

Never before has leadership been so critical, and never before has it seemed in such short supply. It takes extraordinary leadership to keep an organization relevant in a world of relentless chan...

https://www.garyhamel.com/blog/leaders-everywhere-challenge