Reading What Matters Now is a bit like reading the Old Testament. There are the same doom-filled prophecies, the fine turn of phrase, and the plenitude of prescriptions without much concern for their practicality. The ecclesiastic impression is accentuated by the two chapters dedicated to the success and revitalisation of the Christian church, and the precept that theology is one of the fields in which we must seek new principles while rethinking management’s philosophical foundations. Hamel outdoes the Decalogue by providing 25 commandments in place of 10, though he does spoil the effect a bit by calling them “Moonshots”. He even has three messiahs on offer: Bill Gore (managing without hierarchy), Chris Rufer (escaping the management tax) and the India-grown Vineet Nayar (inverting the pyramid).
Hamel finds Sodom and Gomorrah in capitalism and management — at least as they are generally practised today. Starting from the German word raubritter, or “robber baron”, Hamel mercilessly traces instances of greed (“Three-hundred-to-one pay differentials between CEOs and first-level employees”), corruption (“India’s corruption-marred sale of wireless spectrum” also finds honourable mention), and autocracy (“Give someone monarch-like authority, and sooner or later there will be a royal screw-up”). He concludes “the groundwater of business is now heavily contaminated with the run-off from morally blinkered egomania” and lists 10 toxic assumptions that prevent us from creating a “conscientious, accountable and sustainable sort of capitalism”. Hamel pillories the centralising impulse of leaders and the controlitis pervading most corporations to the detriment of passion, initiative, adaptability and innovation.
Because it is impossible, according to Hamel, “to have an organisation that is adaptable, innovative and engaging when power trickles down from the top, when big leaders appoint little leaders, when a handful of executives make the critical calls, and when senior executives are less accountable to employees than the reverse”, he proposes the overthrow of the existing paradigm of management. The aforesaid messiahs, Hamel finds, are leading the hierarchy-less, manager-less and bureaucracy-less organisations that herald the future. Interesting as Hamel’s descriptions of W L Gore, Morning Star and HCL Technologies are, we are left with questions about the practicality, scalability and sustainability of their models.
All the same, Hamel is doing us a valuable service. Many of us in the corporate world have become schizoid about the democratic principles we expect in our political environment and the extent of democracy we are willing to permit inside our own enterprises. As Hamel puts it: “Hubris, myopia and naiveté can corrupt decisions at any level, but that risk goes up when the decision maker’s power is, for practical purposes, incontestable.” Gore dicta – like making the willingness of others to follow the prime test of leadership, using a peer review process to identify and reward leaders, and splitting businesses when they grow beyond 250-300 people – are all pointers in the right direction, even if they remain only aspirational for most corporates today.
What Matters Now carries a deceptive aura of organisation, with five topics (Values, Innovation, Adaptability, Passion and Ideology) neatly packaged into five chapters each. In reality, there is a fair degree of repetition and overlap between chapters, with some of them struggling for content, just to meet that self-imposed number count of five for each topic. For instance, the chapter on the banking crisis provides a fine arena for Hamel’s censorious sentences: “What we’re witnessing is the mother of hangovers – … the boozers … were the captains of capitalism, Federal Reserve policy makers were the distillers, congressional legislators were the rumrunners, and big bank CEOs the bartenders” and “We’re scavengers for excuses; that’s why moral equivocation is infectious” are just two examples. However, the chapter as a whole doesn’t add much to our understanding of the crisis itself or to the thread of this book.
On the other hand, tucked away between the irascibility and the padding, there are some useful frameworks and thought-provoking concepts. For instance, the 12 workplace expectations of what Hamel calls Generation F (no, that stands for “Facebook”) could provide a useful starting point for people designing organisations where “millennials” predominate. Similarly, Hamel’s tweaked version of Maslow’s hierarchy, which he calls the “Hierarchy of Human Capabilities at Work”, consisting of Obedience, Diligence, Expertise, Initiative, Creativity and Passion, is a fruitful construct for those who have not come across it already in his The Future of Management.
Like an Old Testament prophet, when the author of What Matters Now rages, it is out of concern — concern, in this case, about the future of management. George Bernard Shaw once said, “Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.” Gary Hamel is clearly an exception.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
WHAT MATTERS NOW
How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstopping Innovation
Gary Hamel
Josey-Bass 2012;
283 pages; $26.95
