Review of Leading the Revolution

by

John D. Trudel, published in Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM)

by Gary Hamel

Harvard Business School Press, Boston; 2000; ISBN 1-57581-189-5), 333 pages $29.95

This book has extreme significance, and not just for those who work with technology or in areas of New Product Development. It’s a different approach to business strategy, one that is quite nontraditional. One that will, no doubt, be controversial. While the book has some rough edges, I deem it to be a “must read” for all managers who seek to escape the prison of the status quo. It suggests models, methods, and metrics for creating breakthrough businesses.

Until recently Hamel was a London Business School professor.  His research papers on strategy are highly respected. His last book, Competing for the Future (with C.K. Pralahad), was hailed by Business Week as “Best Management Book of the year.” The Economist terms Hamel “the world’s reigning strategy thinker,” and Peter Senge of MIT called him “the most influential thinker on strategy in the Western World.” Hamel took a risk and left academia to found a consulting firm called Strategos, dedicated to helping its clients develop revolutionary strategy. This book represents another risk, and it moves him further down the road to creating a future that he believes in.

Who should read the book? My short answer would be “everyone.” However, I must confess that I’ve long embraced what Hamel advocates. I like what he says. I am overjoyed that people of his stature are now spreading this message. Conversely, most control-centric managers will, I think, react negatively. This book gives strategies for breakthroughs, not evolutionary refinement.  While it is useful to both practitioners and academics, it will not make many in either group comfortable. It’s not like what they are used to reading. Some will call it nonsense.

This is, after all, a book about revolution. Revolution, by definition, is very unsettling to incumbents.

It is hard to say more about the book without getting into fuzzy issues like philosophy, worldview, and core convictions. I have been following Dr. Hamel’s work closely because we agree that the world of business has, for all practical purposes, divided into conflicts between incumbents and insurgents. The tension today is between clout and innovation. If you share that belief, you will like the book. If you don’t, you probably won’t.

Academic business strategies tend still to be linear and incremental. Dr. Gerardo Ungson, the co-author of my last book, Engines of Prosperity, teaches business strategy to executives and graduate students. In that book, he packaged all the doctrinaire business strategies into a single chapter, and then listed their serious flaws. [1] In our view, none of the traditional strategies fit the new economy well. Our thoughts are in line with Hamel’s:  “It was already apparent to me [in the mid-1980’s] that a sterile and deterministic view of strategy was incomplete, if not outdated.” (page ix) In the preface he discusses what has driven him to what novelists would call his “Hero’s journey,” rejecting his professor’s well-meaning advice to “find a generally accepted paradigm and apply it in some new context” and instead striking out to create new concepts “and useful ones at that.” (page x)

Conventional strategies focus on things like market position and developing some form of “competitive advantage.” Hamel was an unbeliever. He says, “As I began to dig deeper, I found that the most successful companies weren’t obsessed with their competitors; instead they were following the polestar of some truly noble aspiration. What counted was not so much how they positioned themselves against long-standing rivals, but how creatively they used their core competencies to create entirely new markets.” (page ix)

Others have, in the past, expressed similar observations. Akio Morita of Sony used to talk about “business innovation.” I used Morita’s notion as the model for my firm. I discovered that while some embrace disruptive strategic thinking, most dismiss it as an odd form of high-tech mysticism that might screw up their business. Better to seek efficiency and to focus on business processes, be they project stage gates, TQM, reengineering, or whatever.

Hamel notes that CEOs and VPs tend to mouth aphorisms like, “Strategy is the easy part, implementation is the hard part.” His answer-- “What rubbish!” (page 12)  He is even more disparaging of corporate staff, noting, “Giving planners responsibility for creating strategy is like expecting bricklayers to create Michelangelo’s Pieta.” (page 20) His book is rich with examples – from perfumes to energy to rubber boots – of winning big through strategic innovation.

The book has aspects that some will dislike. It does not deliver standard methods to teach students or launch newly minted MBAs to advise businesses for high fees. It has good discussions of motivation, metrics, and business models, but there are no prescriptions. That is, I think, endemic of knowledge-based business, and unavoidable.

“Where do [the revolutionary, killer] new business concepts come from?” Hamel asks. You can imagine managers all over the world straining their ears to hear a simple answer that lets them make minor adjustments to business-as-usual and prosper. They don’t get it from Hamel. “The answer is this: New business concepts are always, always, the product of lucky foresight. That’s right – the essential insight does not come out of any dirigiste planning process, it comes from some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, and need.” (page 23)  I love it!

What’s wrong with the book? A few things. I was surprised that a book from Harvard Press contained typos and layout errors, but this one did. More seriously, Professor Hamel does not fully realize that revolutionaries get killed, if not literally, metaphorically. He has little sympathy for those who fail to revolt, “So enough of Dilbert, that whining little weasel…. He’s a whimp. He deserves what he gets.” (page 26)

Hamel gives cases of how people in mid-level positions helped their large, declining, conservative firms survive and even prosper. Unfortunately, of the three heroes depicted in detail, only one, in a Japanese firm, was rewarded. Ever since Soul of a New Machine – 20 years ago, now! – that has been a problem. Cynical engineers call it the “pinball model.” They see it this way: Win definitively and you might get another, harder, game. Lose, or irritate management, and you surely get castrated or fired. That, Professor, is why Dilbert is hugely popular.

Hamel should not ignore the fact that most corporations, for valid reasons, have robust mechanisms for squashing revolution. He asks his readers to charge into that minefield to serve a higher purpose: “You owe it to your friends and colleagues.” (page 154)  Sorry, Professor, that’s naïve. Why do New Ventures and Consultants flourish? Because seasoned experts are essential, and because it’s very difficult to break outside the box from inside the box. Mentor capital is now more valuable than cash! It may be ugly to watch, but one of the saving graces of capitalism is that dysfunctional corporations have the right to die. Now, if we could just encourage that for government….

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1. Gerardo Ungson and John C. Trudel, Engines of Prosperity: Templates for the Information Age, London: Imperial College Press, 1998, Chapter 5.

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