Gary Hamel Change Quotations

You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.

An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.