Agradecimiento

INDICE: REINVENTING YOUR COMPANY


Rule No. 1 Set Unreasonable Expectations By Gary Hamel 1
Rule No. 2 Stretch Your Business Definition By Gary Hamel 3
Rule No. 3 Create a Cause, Not a Business By Gary Hamel 5
Rule No. 4 Listen to New Voices By Gary Hamel 6
Rule No. 5 Design an Open Market for Ideas By Gary Hamel 8
Rule No. 6 Offer an Open Market forCapital By Gary Hamel 10
Rule No. 7 Open Up the Market for Talent By Gary Hamel 12
Rule No. 8 Lower the Risks of Experimentation By Gary Hamel 14
Rule No. 9 Make Like a Cell--Divide and Divide By Gary Hamel 16
Rule No. 10 Pay Your Innovators Well--Really Well By Gary Hamel 17
Shell Breaks Out Even an oil giant can develop a Silicon Valley edge. By Gary Hamel 19Rule No. 1
Set Unreasonable Expectations

By Gary Hamel

A GE Capital executive: It is expected that we will grow our earnings 20% per year or more. When you have objectives that are that outlandish, it forces you to think very differently about your opportunities. If one guy has a 10% target and the other has a 20% target, the second guy is going to do different things.
Here's anexperiment. Ask 25 people in the middle of your organization this question: "What would be a reasonable expectation for top-line growth this year?" Compute the average answer--is it 20%, 30%, or something substantially less ambitious? No company outperforms its aspirations. If most of your colleagues believe you are in a 5% or 10% growth business, you are.
In most companies the majority ofindividuals believe that there is some preordained, uninspiring industry growth rate. I'll bet there aren't many people at American Airlines who believe that their company can grow three or four times faster than Delta Air Lines. The beliefs of your employees set the upper limit on what's possible.
A bold aspiration won't suddenly by itself produce a multitude of nonconformist strategies. But its absencealways yields bland, me-too strategies. Whether the objective is growth in revenues, earnings, or efficiency, nonlinear innovation begins with unreasonable goals.
Convincing people in an organization that it is reasonable to strive for unreasonable goals is tricky. Mere exhortation is not enough. You have to demonstrate, with real examples, that it's actually possible to dramatically outperformthe average. Otherwise the aspiration has no credibility. Growing as fast as one's mediocre peers is deemed good enough. For instance, ask your colleagues what they would do if they were in the lettuce business. You can't install a Pentium chip in a head of lettuce. It's not easy to digitize green leaves and send them zipping over the Internet. Yet thanks to Steve Taylor, the founder of FreshExpress, and a few other pioneers, the market for prewashed, precut, prepackaged lettuce (a salad in a bag) grew from nothing in the late 1980s to $1.4 billion a year by 1999. Send an e-mail to everyone you know in your company: "Table-ready lettuce: $1.4 billion. If someone can do this with a vegetable, what the hell is our excuse?" Never, ever believe you are in a mature industry. There are no matureindustries, only mature managers who unthinkingly accept someone else's definition of what's possible.
One caveat: If you push for unreasonable growth goals, some folks in your organization will search for shortcuts--a mega-acquisition, deep price cuts, rebates. Don't let them get away with it. Only nonlinear innovation will drive long-term wealth creation.

Rule No. 2
Stretch Your BusinessDefinition

By Gary Hamel

Enron: We've never viewed Enron as just an energy company. We're pretty good at creating new products and services around our high-tech trading and risk-management skills.
Who are we? This is perhaps the most fundamental question a company's employees and executives can ask themselves. How they answer determines whether the company searches for unconventional...