February 18, 2008
Hamel’s $5,000 question
It is hard to find a chief executive these days who doesn’t claim to be fostering innovation. Gary Hamel, the influential management theorist, has a sensible way of figuring out which ones are lying.
In an interview published in the latest edition of McKinsey Quarterly, he reveals a series of questions that he puts to rank-and-file employees when trying to assess whether their bosses are wholeheartedly committed to grass roots experimentation. The second of these questions is particularly astute. If you have a new idea, Mr Hamel asks, how long would it take you to get clearance to devote 20 per cent of your time and $5,000 of the company’s cash to testing it in practice?
Mr Hamel, co-author of The Future of Management, is a fan of Google, whose employees are encouraged to develop side projects on company time in the hope that these ideas will eventually pay off commercially. He clearly believes that less funky companies could and should give staff the same leeway - but accepts that this is far from being the case in the majority of cases. “In most companies there’s still a big gap between the rhetoric of innovation and the reality,” he concludes.
