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.
Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
Ultimately, what any company does when it is successful is merely a lagging indicator of its existing culture.
A good idea for a new business tends not to occur in isolation, and often the window of opportunity is very small. So speed is of the essence.
The key to branding, especially for smaller firms, is to focus on a limited number of issue areas and develop superb expertise in those areas.
To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry.
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