Books: Be a management innovator
Gary Hamel's agenda for improving the way companies are run is ambitious, but the underlying logic demands to be taken seriously, argues Julian Birkinshaw.
The Future of Management; Gary Hamel; Harvard Business School Press £15.99.
Gary Hamel has always enjoyed challenging the traditional theories and orthodoxies of the business world. In his 1994 bestseller with CK Prahalad, Competing for the Future, he urged firms to eschew traditional concepts of industry boundaries and competition, and instead craft their own future based on their core competencies. In 2001 he published Leading the Revolution - a call- to-arms for the 'grey-haired revolutionaries' working inside large organisations to push their own ideas and projects through the corporate hierarchy.
His new book, The Future of Management, takes on perhaps the most ingrained orthodoxy of all - the concept of management - and says we need to reinvent it.
