Management Advantage : Gary Hamel is back!!

Gary Hamel is back to what he does best - writing management best sellers. After his path breaking treatise on "The Core Competence of the Corporation" and "Competing for the Future" with C.K.Prahalad, the fortune magazine has labeled him as “the world’s leading expert on business strategy” and the Economist calls him “the world’s reigning strategy guru.”

Gary Hamel is distraught at the way management is lagging behind all other sciences and that very little effort is being made by the academia. He is frusturated with the fact that so few management professors seem committed to inventing the future of management.

In his new book "The Future of Management" (HBS Press Book, Oct 2007) he goes onto argue that

Unlike their counterparts in medicine, engineering and computer science, business school professors do not see themselves as the inventors of new methods, tools and approaches. Most study management as it is and seldom dream of management as it might be, or should be. They describe, but they don't create.

He ponders the question: Why is the Management academia this way?

By and large, my scholarly peers are not romantics- they have not devoted themselves to a grand quest. With in management research there is no project equivalent in scope and ambition to reducing carbon emissions, curing AIDS, imbuing machines with intelligence, developing hydrogen powered vehicles, or commercializing space travel. Where is management's Human Genome Project? Where is its $100 laptop? Where is its manned mission to Mars?

Hamel is sure about what fuels long term success. To him it's not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models but management innovation - new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies.

In the later parts of the book Hamel explains how to turn a company in to a continuous management innovator, revealing: the make or break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of relentless, head snapping change; the toxic effects of traditional management beliefs; the unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in "modern management pioneers".

The radical principles that will need to become part of every company's "Management DNA" and the steps your company can take now to build your "Management Advantage"