Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has worked with leading companies across the globe and is a dynamic and sought-after management speaker. Hamel has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Innovation eXchange.
Hamel has written 17 articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the most reprinted author in the Review’s history. His landmark books have been translated into more than 25 languages. His most recent bestsellers are The Future of Management and What Matters Now. In these volumes, Hamel presents an impassioned plea for reinventing management and lays out a practical blueprint for building organizations that are “fit for the future.”
Years ago, I attended a conference with the title, “Executing Strategy through People.” At the time I wondered, was there an alternative? Had someone figured out how to deliver strategy using monkeys? Apparently not, since our organizations are stilled filled with human beings. But as we know, a lot of those folks wish they were anywhere else but at work. So the topic of this year’s Global Drucker Forum—how to build human-centric organizations—was very timely. During the two-day event in Vienna I had the chance to learn from some incredible people, like management guru Henry Mintzberg, Michelin CEO Jean-Dominque Senard, Harvard’s Rosbeth Kanter, Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin and the Financial Time’s Martin Wolf. I also gave a couple talks on the challenge of humanizing our organizations, and you can find them here.