Top Highlights

• “Management was originally invented,” management theorist Gary Hamel has noted, “to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities.
• Only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work.5
• FIGURE I.1 Radical Management: The Seven Basic Principles of Continuous Innovation
• Four major changes have occurred that help explain why traditional management, which performed so well in economic terms in the twentieth century, is no longer a good fit for today’s social and economic conditions.
• The first change is the continuing shift from semiskilled work to what economists call knowledge work.