Melodies in Marketing

Gary Hamel in late May 2008, gathered together 36 prominent leaders in business and academia to attend Management Lab’s inaugural conference: Inventing the Future of Management. It was structured to address 4 questions and through exercises and interviews, and compile a list of 25 challenges for management in the 21st century.

Four Questions

1. What are the impediments or design flaws preventing organizations to:
   - Adapt to change without trauma
   - Innovate and daily mobilize everyone’s imagination
   - Engage by creating environments conducive to extraordinary contributions
2. Given these systemic impediments and organizational demands in coming years, how should management innovators set the agenda? What big challenges must be addressed?
3. What are some potential solutions to these challenges? Are there exercises, activities, or experiments that would help?
4. What limitations are currently hindering management innovation, and how might they be overcome?

Attendees & Interviews

• Attendees (official list) included Eric Schmidt (Google), Henry Mintzberg (McGill Univ.), James Surowiecki (The New Yorker), Jeffrey Hollender (Seventh Generation), Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford Univ.), John Mackey (Whole Foods Market), Peter Senge (Society for Organizational Learning), Kevin Kelly (Wired), and Tim Brown (IDEO) among many others.
• Pre-Conference interviews (compiled document), highlights everyone’s preliminary answer to the four questions in the following format: Flaws, Fixes, and Other.
• Video Interviews with all Attendees (Quicktime format)

Management “Moonshots”

These are the highlighted challenges and solutions as compiled by Hamel and his team, following the interviews and team exercises. For a detailed look (highly recommended), please see the document at the bottom of this (link) page, which gives the master challenges (as numbered list); broad challenges (Blue headings, as extracted from pre-conference interviews); the big challenges (Red headings, as identified from conference team exercises); and the corresponding points to each (black text).

Gary kindly notes that while many of these aren’t ‘new’, they’re important nonetheless. Here they are:

1. Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management
2. Fully operationalize the ideas of community and citizenship
3. Seek orientation in a higher and broader purpose
4. Distribute (share) the work of creating direction and strategy
5. Develop holistic performance measures
6. Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives
7. Increase trust, reduce fear
8. Create a democracy of information
9. Expand and exploit intellectual variety
10. Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past
11. Enlarge and empower the pro-change constituency
12. Expand the freedom for autonomous action
13. Create more space for emergent strategies
14. Create an internal market for ideas, talent and resources
15. De-structure and dis-aggregate the formal organization
16. Dramatically diminish the influence of (formal) hierarchy
17. Reinvent the work of executive leadership
18. De-politicize decision-making
19. Reinvent the means of “control”
20. Transcend the efficiency vs. innovation trade-off
21. (Further) Unleash human imagination
22. Enable communities of passion
23. Create (more) open organizations
24. Rethink management thinking
25. Humanize (the language of) business

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