Management guru Gary Hamel questions current thinking and outlines Future of Management

Writes Hamel, We have for many decades been living in a post-industrial society. I believe we are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society. The book will be published by Harvard Business School Publishing in October this year.

In the book, drawing on his latest research, Hamel demonstrates that it is innovation in managementrather than in operations, products or strategiesthat is most likely to create long-term advantage. The book talks about what Hamel calls as the toxic effects of the industrial age management beliefs that still predominate in most companies. It will also offer insights into unconventional management practices that are generating breakthrough results in a handful of modern management pioneers and new management principles that must become part of every companys management DNA.

Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, its a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and thats not good. Why? Because managementthe capacity to marshal resources, lay out plans, program work and spur effortis central to the accomplishment of human purpose. When its less effective than it could be, or needs to be, we all pay a price, writes Hamel.

To build its case, Hamel draws lessons from leading innovative companies like Google, W.L. Gore, Whole Foods, IBM, Samsung and Best Buy.

Talking about the changing business landscape, Hamel writes, One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularize the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Increasingly, though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits.

Offering some answers, Hamel notes, How do you discover radically better ways of leading, organizing and managing? The short answer: You look far beyond the boundaries of todays best practice. You look someplace weird, someplace unexpected. To glimpse the future of management, you must search out the positive deviants, organizations and social systems that defy the norms of conventional practice.

Talking about his objective while authoring this much anticipated book, Hamel says, My goal is to help you become a 21st century management pioneer, to equip you to reinvent the principles, processes and practices of management for our post-modern age. My goal is to give you the thinking tools that will allow you to build your own agenda for management innovation, and then execute against it.

Influential author of such concepts as core competence, strategic intent, and industry revolution, Hamel has impacted the language and practice of management around the world. Hamel is also a visiting professor of strategic management area at London Business School.