Penny pinching and rule breaking in corporate America actually creates an environment of balanced truth.
Variety is the key to combat turbulence.
In business, one should always have alternatives.
Tuesday Gary Hamel, a visiting professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School and chairman of Strategos, an international consulting company, shared these and other mentalities aimed to improve America’s business climate as part of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series.
With a lecture entitled “Where is Technology Leading Us?” Hamel, who is a world renowned speaker on strategy and innovation, emphasized the growing necessity of resilience in the corporate world.
“Technology is changing change itself,” Hamel said. “These new technologies are spurring other things to develop.”
With a fast-paced, straight-to-the-point style, Hamel stressed that a successful company has something different than its competitors, it needs to overcome the challenge of resilience.
Today’s companies must be willing to change, he said.
“Those who live by the sword will be shot by the ones who don’t,” he said. “A company must keep changing its strategies.”
Most people, Hamel said, miss the signs of a faltering business.
The best way to eliminate potential failure is to admit that every strategy, however great to begin with, will eventually die, he said.
Aside from his qualitative approach to minimize failure in a company, Hamel suggested other methods for business success.
One of his many analogies described the importance of why a business needs to keep coming up with new ideas.
“One of 60 million sperm make a baby,” Hamel said. “With a low corporate sperm count you’d have to hope that that one corporate sperm will show up.”
Hamel shared reasons why we should be optimistic about the future in business.
We live in one of the most resilient countries. The reason for its resilience is because of the four paradoxes of coherence and diversity, strength and compassion, courage and prudence and the ability to embrace the spiritual as well as the contemporary, he said.
