Are management approaches keeping up with the changes around us? Author and academic, Gary Hamel, doesn’t appear to think so. In a video interview posted on the McKinsey website, Hamel talks about how our current structures and approach are not adequate for the business environment leaders face today. What’s expected of leaders in today’s hierarchical structures seems to be asking too much. The breadth of skills and talent required are found in only a few individuals; far too few to supply the number of super-leaders needed. Hamel considers a different approach, one that is more in synch with the collaborative, virtual, global environment we find ourselves in today. It’s an approach that spreads the leadership responsibilities out to a wider and more diverse group of people . Hamel says, “So here we are in a world of amazing complexity and complex organizations that just require too much from those few people up top. They don’t have the intellectual diversity, the bandwidth, the time to really make all these critical decisions. There’s a reason that, so often in organizations, change is belated; it is infrequent, it is convulsive.”
Recently Hamel has been involved in the latest M-Prize challenge, a contest cosponsored by his Innovation eXcange, the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey, in which managers are invited to submit examples of how their organizations are empowering and training individuals to lead whether or not they are in roles of authority.
The Wall Street Journal ranks Gary Hamel as the world’s most influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy.” One of his books, The Future of Management, was selected as the best business book of the year by Amazon.
You can watch the video interview with Gary Hamel or read the transcript on the McKinsey website: Leaders everywhere: A conversation with Gary Hamel