Gary Hamel: Three Challenges Facing Organizations

By: Karen Rulifson

I just read this blog and couldn't say it better myself:

Published by Michael Lee Stallard on October 11, 2009

Last week I was invited to attend the World Business Forum in NYC with 50 other leading bloggers. The presentation that resonated the most with me was Gary Hamel’s. In it, he outlined three challenges facing today’s organizations:

1. How do we build an organization that can change as fast as change itself? Change is accelerating at this time in history and organizations need to act faster to deal with opportunities and threats. Consider the changes in the last century including in healthcare, microprocesssors, transportation, computing power, the internet, telephony, gene sequencing, biotech, etc.

2. How do we build an organization where innovation is everyone’s job? The accelerated pace of change makes this a necessity. Do employees understand their organizations innovation insights? Is every employee’s contribution to innovation measured?

3. How do we build an organization that actually inspires extraordinary accomplishment? This is the most important of the three challenges facing today’s organizations. On average, seventy-five percent of employees are not engaged in their jobs. We need employees who regard their jobs as the way to bring their passion in the world. Our job as managers is to build a work climate, a sense of purpose that inspires initiative because obedience, diligence and intellect are mere table stakes in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace.

These ideas are from Hamel’s book, The Future of Management.