227: Gary Hamel — Making Organizations as Resilient as Its People
Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has worked with leading companies across the globe and has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years. He also has written 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is currently out with a new book, Humanocracy, which he dives into further on this week’s episode!
We still see people as a commodity and most organizations are not very good at turning on the capabilities of their people. We can confirm this by the fact that Gallup says only 15% of employees are engaged in their work. Management oftentimes was hastily put together by inexperienced CEOs or Founders. Bureaucracy really is just a product of its time.
In Gary’s book, the top companies he interviewed understood the value of their employees and they were highly compensated for it. In the way we treat people today, there is a lot of false economy. Young people feel undervalued because they grew up with the internet, where the world was their oyster. They could seek out information, do things, and feel valued. In a corporate environment, they always have to ask for permission in order to advance and it’s making them seek out greener pastures.
If you examine companies that have really lasted and scaled, as well as adapted to the changing times and reinvented themselves, they all prioritized their people and had a unique management style that kept them engaged, and happy.
If you believe bureaucracy is a tax on human effort, then how are these big companies able to afford it? It seems managers are a fan of everything lean, except for lean management. It’s toxic when leaders start to believe they have the crystal ball. The best leaders strive to create an environment where it’s the best place to fail.
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