What Matters Now

This is not a book about one thing. It's not a 250-page dissertation on leadership, teams or motivation. Instead, it's an agenda for building organizations that can flourish in a world of diminished hopes, relentless change and ferocious competition.

This is not a book about doing better. It's not a manual for people who want to tinker at the margins. Instead, it's an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it--to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.

Leaders today confront a world where the unprecedented is the norm. Wherever one looks, one sees the exceptional and the extraordinary:

• Business newspapers decrying the state of capitalism.
• Once-innovative companies struggling to save off senescence.
• Next gen employees shunning blue chips for social start-ups.
• Corporate miscreants getting pilloried in the blogosphere.
• Entry barriers tumbling in what were once oligopolistic strongholds.
• Hundred year-old business models being rendered irrelevant overnight.
• Newbie organizations crowdsourcing their most creative work.
• National governments lurching towards bankruptcy.
• Investors angrily confronting greedy CEOs and complacent boards.
• Newly omnipotent customers eagerly wielding their power.
• Social media dramatically transforming the way human beings connect, learn and collaborate.

Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth isn't. That's why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere who are eager to...

• move from defense to offense
• reverse the tide of commoditization
• defeat bureaucracy
• astonish their customers
• foster extraordinary contribution
• capture the moral high ground
• outrun change
• build a company that's truly fit for the future