WCA Leadership Summit Session 2b: Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel was ranked as the #1 Business Thinker of 2008 by The Wall Street Journal and called “the world’s leading expert on business strategy” by Fortune. An author, speaker, professor, and innovative management consultant, he is most widely known for originating concepts such as “strategic intent” and “core competencies.” The founder of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company, his vision for the workplace revolves around releasing human potential and creativity. Hamel will address the paradigm shift needed to fully engage the potential of people and explain how tomorrow’s most successful companies will be organized. He is the author of Leading the Revolution and The Future of Management.

Notes from this session follow.

Managing Differently NOW

• Are you changing as fast as the world around you?
• % people attending church services down to 17%
• People feelings about Christians have turned negative.
• Barna found very few differences between Christians and non-Christians
• 9 of 10 Americans say they have faith in God. 1/3 will tell you they are spiritual but not religious.
• We’re not challenged by ??? but by apathy and ???
• Maybe we should be thankful for that fewer people are going through the motions of Christianity.
• Maybe we should be thankful that there is a hunger for authenticity since we have an authentic God.
• Let’s not feel sorry for ourselves as church leaders
• Our problem is inertia
• Pace of change has gone hypercritical (exponential)
• You’re either going forward or your going backward, there’s no standing still.
• Orgs must become more resilient as the world becomes more turbulent.
• Most orgs end up tied to one business model and flounder when the model flounders
• Taking off like a rocket… rocket falls back to earth, usually in pieces.
• 2^nd law of thermodynamics applies to orgs – visions become strategies, strategies become policies… organizational entropy.
• Need an evolutionary advantage – a process for change
• We need to change the way we change.

4 key imperatives for outrunning change

1) Conquer denial

• Pattern: Dismiss… rationalize… mitigate… confront
• Cultivate a culture of unflinching honesty
• Question your beliefs (not creedal, but practices)
• Listen to the renegades and dissidents
• Do we welcome descent or do we try to stifle it?
• The job of every leader is to make change seem more appealing than standing pat.
• Need to consider a lot of crazy ideas before you find one winner

We need to challenge our orthodoxies

• Look at your programs and ask “What hasn’t changed for 3-5 years?” Why hasn’t it changed?
• Compare your church to other churches in your community? What are we all doing the same? Is it because the Lord commanded it or because we’re reading the same books.
• The longer ??? you begin to mistake the end of your rut for the horizon. (what’s the whole quote?)
• Are you more committed to redemption or to your programs?
• Mental models of the leadership team depreciates faster than their authority
• Is the goal creating great leaders or creating organizations that don’t need super-human leaders?
• Leadership is less about command and control and more about connecting people
• The web has natural hierarchies and natural leaders
• A lot of churches have been trying to turn themselves into businesses while a lot of businesses are trying to turn themselves into causes.
• Early church was spiritually powerful but institutionally weak. Too many churches today are the other way around.
• We are not going to get fundamentally better at changing lives until we get fundamentally better at changing our churches.

Fantastic talk! Tons of wisdom to process!