Top 100 Gary Hamel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Win small, win early, win often.”

— Gary Hamel

2. “Great accomplishments start with great aspirations.”

— Gary Hamel

3. “You can’t use an old map to see a new land.”

— Gary Hamel

4. “Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.”

— Gary Hamel

5. “Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.”

— Gary Hamel

6. “A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.”

— Gary Hamel

7. “Are we changing as fast as the world around us?”

— Gary Hamel

8. “Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.”

— Gary Hamel

9. “The problem with the future is that it is different, if you are unable to think differently, the future will always arrive as a surprise.”

— Gary Hamel

10. “Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.”

— Gary Hamel

11. “Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.”

— Gary Hamel

12. “You can’t build an adaptable organization without adaptable people – and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.”

— Gary Hamel

13. “Organizational structures of today demand too much from a few, and not much at all from everyone else.”

— Gary Hamel

14. “Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.”

— Gary Hamel

15. “Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.”

— Gary Hamel

16. “In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight – insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.”

— Gary Hamel

17. “Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it. You’ve got one option now – to shoot first. You’ve got to out innovate the innovators.”

— Gary Hamel

18. “Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It’s the only insurance against irrelevance. It’s the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It’s the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.”

— Gary Hamel

19. “A titled leader relies heavily on positional power to get things done; a natural leader is able to mobilize others without the whip of formal authority.”

— Gary Hamel

20. “The opportunities for future growth are everywhere. Seeing the future has nothing to do with speculating about what might happen. Rather, you must understand the revolutionary potential of what is already happening.”

— Gary Hamel

21. “In an increasingly non-linear economy, incremental change is not enough-you have to build a capacity for strategy innovation, one that increases your ability to recognize new opportunities.”

— Gary Hamel

22. “An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.”

— Gary Hamel

23. “The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

— Gary Hamel

24. “Any company that cannot imagine the future won’t be around to enjoy it.”

— Gary Hamel

25. “There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.”

— Gary Hamel

26. “Never before has the gap between what we can imagine and what we can accomplish been smaller.”

— Gary Hamel

27. “Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can’t dodge the bullet – you’re going to have to shoot first. You’re going to have to out-innovate the innovators.”

— Gary Hamel

28. “The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs.”

— Gary Hamel

29. “What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination.”

— Gary Hamel

30. “We like to believe we can break strategy down to Five Forces or Seven Ss. But you can’t. Strategy is extraordinarily emotional and demanding.”

— Gary Hamel

31. “We’ve reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.”

— Gary Hamel

32. “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.”

— Gary Hamel

33. “An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It’s always redefining its ‘core business’ in ways that open up new avenues for growth.”

— Gary Hamel

34. “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.”

— Gary Hamel

35. “For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.”

— Gary Hamel

36. “A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy.”

— Gary Hamel

37. “Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.”

— Gary Hamel

38. “From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.”

— Gary Hamel

39. “Competition for the future is competition to create and dominate emerging opportunities-to stake out new competitive space. Creating the future is more challenging than playing catch up, in that you have to create your own roadmap.”

— Gary Hamel

40. “Strategy is, above all else, the search for above average returns.”

— Gary Hamel

41. “There’s no such thing as “sustaining” leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.”

— Gary Hamel

42. “This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.”

— Gary Hamel

43. “The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.”

— Gary Hamel

44. “One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.”

— Gary Hamel

Featured in: Strong Quotes

45. “We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.”

— Gary Hamel

46. “In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.”

— Gary Hamel

47. “What’s true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That’s why the most resilient things in our world – biological life, stock markets, the Internet – are loosely organized.”

— Gary Hamel

48. “The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.”

— Gary Hamel

49. “Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns.”

— Gary Hamel

50. “In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can’t, you’ll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.”

— Gary Hamel