Top 100 Gary Hamel Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Only stupid questions create wealth.”

— Gary Hamel

53. “Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.”

— Gary Hamel

54. “Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.”

— Gary Hamel

55. “Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.”

— Gary Hamel

56. “I’m a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business.”

— Gary Hamel

57. “To be embraced, a change effort must be socially constructed in a process that gives everyone the right to set priorities, diagnose barriers, and generate options.”

— Gary Hamel

58. “Building human-centered organizations doesn’t imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don’t want to be nannied.”

— Gary Hamel

59. “There’s a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.”

— Gary Hamel

60. “The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.”

— Gary Hamel

61. “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.”

— Gary Hamel

62. “Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.”

— Gary Hamel

63. “Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink. The same goes for strategies. How many organizations carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?”

— Gary Hamel

64. “All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past – by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.”

— Gary Hamel

65. “It’s important to remember that innovators in business don’t always get a platform.”

— Gary Hamel

66. “I am an ardent supporter of capitalism – but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.”

— Gary Hamel

67. “As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.”

— Gary Hamel

68. “We live in a moment that is pregnant with possibility.”

— Gary Hamel

69. “When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating.”

— Gary Hamel

70. “Obviously, you don’t have to be religious to be moral, and beastly people are sometimes religious.”

— Gary Hamel

71. “Your organization can start tweeting, but that wont change its DNA.”

— Gary Hamel

72. “I’m not one of those professors whose office is encased floor-to-ceiling with books. By the way, I think academics do this to intimidate their visitors.”

— Gary Hamel

73. “Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.”

— Gary Hamel

74. “Our biggest challenge is how to create a self-renewing company.”

— Gary Hamel

75. “Because competence-building represents more cumulative learning than great leaps of inventiveness, it is difficult to “time compress” competence-building.”

— Gary Hamel

76. “Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you’re on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it’s cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you’ve tried all these things, you’re still going to have to dismount.”

— Gary Hamel

77. “Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.”

— Gary Hamel

78. “An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.”

— Gary Hamel

79. “Remarkable contributions are typically spawned by a passionate commitment to transcendent values such as beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, charity, fidelity, joy, courage and honor.”

— Gary Hamel

80. “In an ideal world, an individual’s institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.”

— Gary Hamel

81. “I don’t know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.”

— Gary Hamel

82. “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not going to stray from familiar paths.”

— Gary Hamel

83. “Executives often wrongly equate “good value” with “low price.” Instead, “good value” should mean outstanding value for the price.”

— Gary Hamel

84. “To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.”

— Gary Hamel

85. “In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.”

— Gary Hamel

86. “For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history.”

— Gary Hamel

87. “In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record – it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart.”

— Gary Hamel

88. “Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.”

— Gary Hamel

89. “Truth be told, there are lots of companies that provide exemplary phone support. DirecTV, Virgin America and Apple are a few that regularly exceed my expectations.”

— Gary Hamel

90. “Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.”

— Gary Hamel

91. “Companies do not do new things because they understand it but because they feel it.”

— Gary Hamel

92. “At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.”

— Gary Hamel

93. “Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane.”

— Gary Hamel

94. “There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.”

— Gary Hamel

95. “The value of your network is the square of the number of people in it.”

— Gary Hamel

96. “Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.”

— Gary Hamel

97. “All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.”

— Gary Hamel

98. “In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.”

— Gary Hamel

99. “The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if ‘do unto others’ really was a rule.”

— Gary Hamel

100. “In our company the trick is to change jobs in time to guarantee that the long-term pay-off you promised four years ago in your capital budget proposal becomes someone else’s short-term performance target.”

— Gary Hamel