Gary Hamel Quotes

If longevity is the best index to measure a company, a basic requirement is the ability of the corporation to generate new and new leaders.

Challenges need to be given to an organization.

Sometimes, you do need different leaders for different stages of the company.

Unilever has been around for 100-plus years. We want to be around for several hundred more years.

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.

It's better to be in charge of change than to have to react to change.

And the reason for focusing on that time frame is that it's going to take us a considerable period of time to develop the new capabilities, processes and organizations that will be needed.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

There are limits to what reorganization and reform can do.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It's rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.

You have to build businesses for longer term.

Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises.

Culture change means we will do things differently.

The definition of success is that the company doesn't miss a beat. Do I love what I do? Oh yeah - I love it more than ever. You've got to have that energy level 24/7. But you've also got to make sure the transition is smooth. Being realistic, most high-tech companies haven't done that well.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

Optimism is the ultimate definition of a leader. A leader has to look optimistically at what is ahead while not ignoring the challenges that must be overcome. Those challenges are in government, politics, world leadership, and even in community life.

What I teach our people is that, as a leader, you have four key roles apart from people management. First is to champion the grand vision. Two, install systems and a culture to run experiments. The third thing is to savour surprises. The fourth thing is that even a leader's ideas need to be subjected to tests.

As chief of staff, I was responsible for running a multibillion-dollar organization with over 34,000 employees, and working on everything from health care to transportation.

Companies become what they want to become.

You can't manage the creative process on a quarterly basis. The way we're structured has really helped us grow.

People should look at building long-term businesses, not just selling a business.