**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23
Interpretation
Successful business ideas often arise from a combination of luck and vision.
This quote by Gary Hamel emphasizes that new business concepts are not merely the result of structured planning but emerge from a blend of serendipity, personal drive, and visionary foresight. It suggests that while chance plays a vital role in innovation, there must also be clarity in understanding where potential opportunities lie.
In practice
During a business seminar focused on entrepreneurship, this quote could inspire attendees to embrace uncertainty as they develop their ideas.
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.
Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO - aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo - all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.
Imitation can be commercial suicide.
Many businesses with unpopular products or inefficient production find it much easier to curry the favor of a few influential politicians or a government agency than to compete in the open market.
Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making.
I don't think a true company - one that builds sustainable value - can ever only exist online or remotely.
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