MOON SHOTS FOR
MANAGEMENT
By Gary Hamel
Summary
In May 2008, a group of management professors and senior executives collaborated to create a
management agenda for the next 100 years. Gary Hamel led the so-called renegade brigade,
which comprised scholars such as C.K. Prahalad, Peter Senge, and Jeffrey Pfeffer; new-age
intellectuals like James Surowiecki; and progressive CEOs like John Mackey of Whole Foods, Terri
Kelly of W.L. Gore, and Tim Brown of IDEO. A set of similar convictions about the importance of
management and a sense of urgency about reforming it for a new period drew them together.
The initial job for the group was to create a list of issues that would focus the efforts of
management innovators all over the world. As a result, Hamel (who founded the Management
Lab, a research institution dedicated to management innovation) specifies 25 "moon shots"—
ambitious targets that managers should strive towards in order to develop Management 2.0.
The urgency of expanding management's obligations beyond simply earning shareholder wealth
is at the top of the list. To do so, the field's philosophical roots must be rebuilt so that work serves
a higher purpose, as well as the concepts of community and citizenship must be properly
integrated into organizations. A number of challenges are aimed at reducing the damaging
impacts of hierarchy. Others are looking for better ways to release creativity and profit on
employees' interests. Others aim to break free from the constraints of standard management
thought patterns.
Not all of the moonshots are novel, but many address difficulties that plague enormous
enterprises. Their mission is to inspire fresh solutions to long-standing challenges by making
every firm as human as the individuals who work there.
Overview
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"Modern" management, much of which dates back to the late nineteenth century, has
achieved its peak of development.
A group of professors and CEOs devised 25 ambitious challenges to put forth a road map
for reinvention.
Companies will be unable to function in tomorrow's turbulent world unless management
innovators address these concerns.
Creating a Management Innovation Agenda
What aspect of huge businesses' management, structure, and
leadership will jeopardize their capacity to prosper in the next
decades? What changes in management ideas and practices will be
required to establish firms that are genuinely fit for the future? These
were the questions posed to 35 management researchers and
practitioners who gathered in California for two days to discuss the
future of management. The Management Lab organized the
conference, which comprised a broad mix of seasoned academics,
new-age management gurus, progressive CEOs, and venture investors.
The discussions were lively and occasionally heated. Throughout it all,
no one lost sight of the ultimate goal: to create a bold agenda that
would inspire management's reinvention in the twenty-first century.
We were aware, as we grappled with this assignment, that
management specialists frequently suffer from ambition-deficit
condition. What, we wondered, was management's equivalent to
deciphering the human genome, developing an AIDS treatment, or
halting global warming?
Following the event, a subgroup compiled a master list of challenges
from the conference materials. Our intention was not to reduce the list
into a few of meta-challenges, but to give a reasonably complete
catalog that reflected the many and often subtle perspectives of
individuals who had participated. In the end, the purpose that brought
us together was more significant than the conference itself: to give
support, guidance, and a little air cover for management renegades
worldwide.
Management’s Grand Challenges
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Ensure that management's job serves a greater goal. Management,
both in theory and practice, must focus on achieving noble, socially
meaningful goals.
Integrate the concepts of community and citizenship into management
systems. Processes and procedures that reflect the interconnectedness
of all stakeholder groups are required.
Rebuild the intellectual basis of management. To create organizations
that are more than just efficient, we will need to learn from subjects
such as biology, political science, and religion.
Remove formal hierarchy's diseases. Natural hierarchies have benefits
because authority rises from the bottom and leaders arise rather than
being appointed.
Reduce your fear and improve your faith. Mistrust and fear are
corrosive to creativity and engagement and must be eliminated from
management systems of the future.
Control mechanisms must be reinvented. To overcome the disciplineversus-freedom trade-off, control systems must foster control from
inside rather than external restraints.
Rethink what it means to be a leader. The idea of a leader as a heroic
decision maker is unsustainable. Leaders must reinvent themselves as
social-systems builders who foster creativity and cooperation.
Increase and capitalize on diversity. We need to develop a management
structure that values diversity.
Reimagine strategy development as an emergent process. In a volatile
environment, strategy must reflect biological principles such as
variation, selection, and retention.
Disassemble and deconstruct the organization. Large organizations
must be disaggregated into smaller, more pliable components in order
to become more adaptive and inventive.
Reduce the attraction of the past dramatically. Existing management
systems frequently unconsciously perpetuate the status quo. They
must promote innovation and change in the future.
Share the responsibility for establishing direction. To elicit
commitment, responsibility for goal formulation must be dispersed
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through a process in which share of voice is determined by insight
rather than power.
Create comprehensive performance metrics. Existing performance
measures must be redesigned because they place insufficient emphasis
on the key human talents that drive success in the creative economy.
Extend executive timetables and views. Alternatives to compensation
and reward systems that encourage managers to forsake long-term
goals for short-term advantages must be developed.
Create an information democracy. Companies require information
systems that enable every employee to operate in the best interests of
the whole organization.
Empower the rebels while disarming the reactionaries. Employees
with emotional equity engaged in the future rather than the past must
be given more authority by management systems.
Increase the level of employee autonomy. Management systems must
be modified to make grassroots initiatives and local experimentation
more feasible.
Make an internal marketplace for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets
are better at allocating resources than hierarchies, and organizations'
resource allocation strategies must reflect this fact.
Decision-making should be depoliticized. Positional biases must be
avoided in decision-making processes, which should draw on the
collective expertise of the whole business and beyond.
Improve the optimization of trade-offs. Management systems
frequently impose either-or options. What is required are hybrid
systems that optimize critical trade-offs quietly.
Increase the scope of human imagination. A lot is known about what
inspires human creativity. This understanding must be employed more
effectively in the design of management systems.
Create passionate communities. Management systems must promote
the establishment of self-defining communities of passion in order to
optimize employee engagement.
Management must be retooled for an open world. Value-creating
networks frequently transcend the borders of the organization,
rendering traditional power-based management techniques
ineffectual. New management tools are required for the construction
and shaping of complex ecosystems.
Humanize business terminology and practice. Management systems of
the future must give equal weight to eternal human principles like
beauty, justice, and community as they do to traditional aims like
efficiency, advantage, and profit.
Retrain the brains of managers. Deductive and analytical skills in
managers must be supplemented with conceptual and systemsthinking abilities.
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Management: Beliefs
Shared Beliefs:
Selected management issue:
1. getting semiskilled employees to
perform repetitive activities
competently, diligently, and efficiently
2. coordinating those efforts in ways that
enabled complex goods and services to
be produced in large quantities
3. executives and experts must first admit
that they’ve reached the limits of
Management 1.0
4. They must face the fact that
tomorrow’s business imperatives lie
outside the performance envelope of
today’s bureaucracy-infused
management practices
5. they must cultivate, rather than
repress, their dissatisfaction with the
status quo. What’s needed is a little
righteous indignation
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Equipping organizations to tackle the future
would require a management revolution no
less momentous than the one that spawned
modern industry.
Shared Beliefs:
1. getting semiskilled
employees to perform
repetitive activities
competently, diligently,
and efficiently
2. coordinating those efforts
in ways that enabled
complex goods and
services to be produced in
large quantities
3. executives and experts
must first admit that
they’ve reached the limits
of Management 1.0
4. They must face the fact
that tomorrow’s business
imperatives lie outside the
performance envelope of
today’s bureaucracyinfused management
practices
5. they must cultivate, rather
than repress, their
dissatisfaction with the
status quo. What’s needed
is a little righteous
indignation
Underlying Assumption
1. They experienced a lot of
failures
2. They had to adjust since
they are providing their
services
3. In order to gain the trust,
they have to be pure
honest.
4. Being prepared is nothing
without Courage
5. They have to be productive
and observant