Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that organizations tend to cling to past successes rather than innovating, only changing when forced by crises.
Gary Hamel's quote reflects on the tendency of large organizations to prioritize historical achievements and established practices over the dynamic needs of current stakeholders. This ingrained behavior often leads to stagnation, as companies wait for a crisis to motivate significant change, highlighting the need for proactive adaptation rather than reactive measures to evolving challenges.
In practice
In a corporate strategy meeting to discuss future innovations.
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.
If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
Participant (Productions) is the only production company in town that has a double bottom line: social good plus financial returns. It's too early to tell how our returns are going to look - though all signs are promising - but social good is what we're really after.
Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?
Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
A company has a greater responsibility than making money for its stockholders. We have a responsibility to our employees to recognize their dignity as human beings.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.
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