Conversations
Creating Human-Centered Organizations
An Interview with Gary Hamel
Jim Euchner talks with Gary Hamel about the nature of bureaucratic organizations and how we can make organizations more inno-
vative, more resilient, and more human.
Gary Hamel and Jim Euchner
Jim Euchner [JE]: You have published many books over the
years, including Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution,
and your latest book, Humanocracy. Several threads run through
these books: the innovation imperative, the bureaucratic dif-
ficulty of innovation, and the value of empowering people
throughout the organization. Another theme, which is in the
title of one of your books and is subtext of the others, is the
need for revolutionaries to make innovative stuff happen. Can
you discuss your concept of a corporate revolutionary?
Gary Hamel [GH]: Let me start with innovation. It has
always seemed to me that the most important thing about
any strategy is how different it is from every other strategy
or every other idea. It is clear to me that the ideas that really
make a difference in our world are ideas that, at first glance,
are going to seem a little crazy. These ideas will not imme-
diately have a constituency around them, and yet those are
the ideas that move our species forward.
One of the most influential books that I read early in my
career was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Kuhn said knowledge advances through punctuated equi-
librium. A group of scientists will come together and coalesce
around a particular set of assumptions—some knowledge
Gary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business
thinkers. He has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more
than 30 years and is director of the Management Lab. Hamel has written articles
for numerous publications, including Harvard Business Review, The Financial
Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune. He’s written several best-selling
books, including Humanocracy, What Matters Now, and The Future of
Management. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
He earned his PhD in international business from the University of Michigan
and his MBA from Andrews University. gary@managementlab.org
Jim Euchner is editor-in-chief of Research-Technology Management and
Honorary Professor at Aston University (UK). He previously held senior
management positions in innovation leadership at Goodyear Tire and Rubber
Company, Pitney Bowes, and Bell Atlantic. He holds BS and MS degrees in
mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell and Princeton
Universities, respectively, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
euchner@iriweb.org
DOI: 10.1080/08956308.2020.1842629
Copyright © 2020, Innovation Research Interchange.
Published by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.
structure—and that knowledge structure will remain unchal-
lenged, often for decades. Only slowly does pressure build
as contrary evidence is accumulated, and then you have an
intellectual revolution that embraces a different set of
assumptions.
Kuhn said revolutions tend to come either from young
people or from people outside the immediate field of inquiry.
Even today most of the big ideas in Silicon Valley are coming
from outsiders—mostly young people but often people who
do not have 10 or 20 years of experience working in the
particular industry they are now intending to change.
My interest over the years has been how to create the
context and the opportunity for those kinds of ideas to
emerge. You have to start by recognizing that there is much
in organizations that works against any idea that is truly
unconventional. Almost by definition, any idea that is
unconventional will also be uncomfortable for many people.
The moment you recognize that, you start to understand that
innovation is as much a political problem as it is a creativity
problem. How do you bring other people along? How do you
build a constituency for the future that is more powerful
than the constituency for the status quo?
JE: How do you answer that question?
GH: Let me get a little intellectual for a moment and start with
an overarching framework that I think is useful. If you think
about business, it is helpful to think in terms of the following
hierarchy. At the top you have a paradigm—a worldview about
the nature of business, the nature of human beings, the nature
of consumers, whatever it may be. You have acquired certain
very deeply held assumptions about the nature of the world
around you, and these are mostly invisible to you.
Those beliefs point you toward certain problems and away
from other problems. They help to define for you what prob-
lems are worth solving. Once you are focused on a problem,
you tend to look for principles that will help you solve it. What
are the broad principles that are going to be useful in address-
ing this problem?
Research-Technology Management • January—February 2021 | 13

Gary Hamel is an influential business thinker and author of Humanocracy.
In an organization, over time, those principles get embed-
ded in processes—how we allocate resources, how we plan,
how we hire people, how we train them, how we reward
them. Those processes drive everyday practices—routines for
submitting a budget request, running a project review meet-
ing, etc. The processes get scripted into everyday practices—
repeatable, everyday practices that drive performance.
This is a very simple model that goes from a paradigm to
a problem to principles to processes, practices, and finally
performance. We have gotten stuck in our ability to improve
The argument I make in
Humanocracy is this: you come to
a point in any field of human
endeavor where you cannot solve
the new problems with the old
principles or the old thinking.
14 | Research-Technology Management
our organizations because we have been stuck, in a Kuhnian
sense, in our paradigms about people and work.
One of our beliefs is that human beings are a resource. In
the old, industrial model, an institution hires individuals to
produce products and services and, ultimately, to make a
profit. In that view of the world, the individual is an instru-
ment. And, of course, we as people are not at our best when
we are treated as instruments. I would argue that as long as
that is the way we think about human beings at work, we
have put an absolute cap on organizational capability. There
are simply things you will never get out of the human beings
inside your organization if the human resources model is the
lens through which you view them and their work.
So the first, most deeply embedded paradigmatic belief is
that human beings are instruments. The second is that you
cannot manage without managers, that the best way to orga-
nize human activity is through a formal hierarchy of decision
rights: more senior people supervise fewer senior people,
down through a formal pyramid. We have seen that formal
pyramid for all of human history, as far as we can go back,
so it seems logical to assume that it is a necessary precondi-
tion for coordinated human activity. But that is a deeply
paradigmatic belief—that the best or the only practical way
of organizing people at work is through a hierarchy of formal
authority.
The third paradigmatic belief is that the most important
problem to solve in a large organization is the problem of
efficiency—of doing more with less, of maximizing the ratio
of impact over resources.
This set of beliefs points leaders to a particular set of prob-
lems, and these are largely about how to get people to do what
we want them to do. In order to create efficiency at scale with
human beings as a resource, you will end up gravitating
towards a particular set of principles about work design: spe-
cialization, standardization, routinization, formalization, strat-
ification. All of these help you solve the problem within your
paradigm. And then, of course, those principles get embedded
in our processes for planning and budgeting and all of the
other ways that work gets done in an organization.
It has been 60 years since Douglas McGregor wrote The
Human Side of Enterprise. I would argue that our organizations,
in the last 60 years, have not become fundamentally more
capable. Here and there, there are things that we can do that
we could not do before, but are we really fundamentally
more capable? I do not think so.
Why is that? My answer is that we have continued to work
inside of that old paradigm. We have continued to prioritize
the problem of efficiency at scale over other problems that
might be more important. We have continued to work within
a set of outdated principles. And until you change the para-
digm, you are stuck. You can get better at the margins, but
only at the margins, and this is not enough. The argument I
make in Humanocracy comes down to this: you come to a point
in any field of human endeavor where you cannot solve the
new problems with the old principles or the old thinking.
Let us say the goal is not efficiency at scale, but the goal
is entrepreneurship at scale. Or the goal is resilience at scale.
Conversations
If that is the case, then all of the accumulated process, prac-
tices, and principles of management are of little value. In
fact, they are likely to be a hindrance and a barrier.
In Humanocracy we give quite a few examples of compa-
nies that are managed in radically different ways, companies
with almost no formal hierarchy at all, for example. Many
of these companies, like W. L. Gore, have been around for
60 years. There are many case studies that have been written
about them. Executives benchmark them, yet little changes.
Why is this? Because when we see these aberrant orga-
nizations that have escaped the old model, what we focus
on is what they do. How do you guys do a performance
review? How do you make your resource allocational deci-
sions? How do you evaluate the attractiveness of a new tech-
nology? We focus on what they do when what we should
focus on is how they think.
What I am saying, in simple terms, is that we are at a point
in the history of business, given the new challenges that
organizations are facing, that requires not only better pro-
cesses or practices, but better paradigms that help us see
better the problems we are confronting and help us to
develop principles more suited to today’s realities.
JE: I think of open source software. Some great, complex soft-
ware has been developed by organizations based on hypotheses
about people and organizations that are almost diametrically
opposed to those of the dominant paradigm: people are con-
tributors; there is no hierarchy; you earn your right to help
make decisions by your contributions. It is a model that shows
that, at some level of scale—Apache and android are huge, for
example—that a very different model can work.
GH: It is so interesting that you would say that. I have long
been a very keen student of open source. How is it that the
world’s most ubiquitous software, Linux, was created with-
out any bureaucratic structure at all? It currently contains
over 26 million lines of code and has had 15,000 contribu-
tors? How did that happen?
Another influential book to me was Eric Raymond’s The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. He explained the way the open
source community emerged. It gave me enough reason to
be hopeful. Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control at around the
same time, and Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute
did some interesting work on how you can create structures
that are self-ordering without a lot of outside influence.
All of these things told me that there is another way of
doing things if we are willing to look for it. But you have to
go back to those paradigmatic beliefs, reframe the problem,
and discover new principles to meaningfully improve how
organizations work.
JE: I will confess that, in my career in R&D, I have tried to
play the role of impedance matching between the innovation
function and the larger organization. Sometimes, you can
make something radically new happen inside an existing
organization—I can cite examples that I am very pleased
Conversations
I never believed that we had to
bifurcate our organizations to innovate.
. . I reject the idea that innovation
should somehow take place outside of
the core business.
with—but I have found that their durability and their ability
to regenerate and grow is challenging.
GH: I had exactly the same experience. Because I cared
about innovation, I ended up doing a lot of work inside of
organizations to improve innovation capabilities. We would
go into these organizations, train a group of people to think
like game changers, create a space in the organization for
these people to do new work. We would work with the
client to put a project team together, brainstorm, prototype,
and often achieve enormous success. The company might
even create a new business or some radically new products,
and that might create a kink in the growth rate of the com-
pany. And yet, we would come back three or four years
later, and find that it had all dissipated. The team was dis-
banded; the ideas had not become mature; the pipeline had
run dry again.
I started to have this feeling that I was trying to teach a
dog to walk on its hind legs—not the individuals themselves,
but the organization. We were doing amazing work; it cre-
ated a lot of value, but it was not sustained. I began to realize
at some point that if every organization struggles with this,
if we were seeing this again and again and again, then it had
to be a DNA-level problem. It must have to do with the
paradigms on which organizations themselves are built.
Fundamentally, our organizations were built as replica-
tion machines. Anything that is truly new and novel will
exist only briefly in such organizations before being overrun
and subsumed into the broader task of just doing the same
thing over and over again, a little better. Many senior lead-
ers have begun to accept this; I would almost say they have
given up.
Clay Christiansen reached the conclusion that large orga-
nizations are really incapable of game-changing innovation.
He thought that the only way you can engender anything
really new is by separating innovation activities from the
broader work of running the business. The idea was that the
activities of running the business and creating the future are
so antithetical that you really have to isolate the innovation
for it to survive.
Yet, when you look at the evidence, you see that most of
incubators and accelerators fail to do much of anything. They
are not so much incubators as orphanages. They are out on
the edges of the organization where they cannot get the
January—February 2021 | 15
resources they need, and yet they still have too many rules
and regulations to enable them to operate as startups. They
almost have the worst of both worlds.
But I never believed that. I never believed that we had to
bifurcate our organizations to innovate.
Let us be clear. If you are working on something new, you
need a team, and they need a budget, and they may even be
in a separate workspace. But I reject the idea that innovation
should somehow take place outside of the core business. I
also reject the idea that most of those new ideas are going to
come from people with dedicated innovation roles. I do not
believe that for a moment.
I can give you stories from digital companies like Amazon
and from old industrial companies like Whirlpool, and they
are stories of front-line employees who were the source of
many of the most important innovations for those compa-
nies. Again, we have assumptions about the capabilities of
ordinary people that are just not accurate. And it affects how
we manage innovation.
JE: It also affects how we manage people. How is technology
affecting this tendency? Are technologies being used to rein-
force the old paradigm, or are they being used to create a
new paradigm?
You can use AI to control people in ways they could never
have been controlled before, for example. You can also use
it to empower people to do more. Are the opportunities to
unleash human potential through technology going to be
caught up in the same dynamic we discussed about break-
through innovation?
GH: That is a really good question. At the moment, I think
we are more inclined to use technology to reinforce the
impulse to monitor, standardize, and control. Productivity
is measured day by day, hour by hour. We can look at the
data in great detail with the tools we now have.
The challenge is—and again, there is a paradox here—that
control is absolutely necessary. I am not an enemy of control.
But what I think has happened, as with so many other ide-
ologies, is that the ideology of controlism has slipped the
bounds of common sense.
Unfortunately, I think that is where we are headed. Some
people call it Digital Taylorism. These new technologies are
allowing us to work in radically new ways, but we are using
them in old ways. I think that it is useful to put the tendency
to seek control into an historical context to indicate how
inappropriate it is today.
If you go back 150 years, the average employee was illit-
erate—not just poorly educated, illiterate. You needed man-
agers who were more highly trained to tell them what to do.
A hundred and fifty years ago, information was very expen-
sive to accumulate and move, and the best way to manage
information was to have 10 people report up to a manager
who would consolidate their inputs and then report up his
results again to the next layer, and so on. The formal hier-
archy, more than anything else, was really an information
processing technology.
16 | Research-Technology Management
Finally, 150 years ago, scale was the primary advantage.
The mere fact you could make a car and make it affordable
was enough to win in the marketplace. Now, scale is just one
advantage among many. Efficiency is still important, but in
very few industries is efficiency a defining advantage. All of
these things have changed.
Employees today are pretty well educated, and we can
move information instantly throughout the organization. But
we have allowed ourselves to remain hostage to a manage-
ment model based on the old thinking and the old model, a
model that required multiple layers of managers just to get
things done. As long as the architecture remains this pyramidal
structure where your value is your capacity to control, to make
sure nobody is ever surprised, to keep everybody coloring
within the lines, then I think technology is more likely to be
used to exert even tighter control rather than to empower.
There are counterexamples, however. Buurtzorg is the
largest home health provider in the Netherlands. They have
16,000 nurses and caregivers spread across Holland. All of
those caregivers are organized into small teams of 12 people.
And within each team, they have a set of managerial roles.
They do not have any managers; instead, they have disag-
gregated the managerial role. So, in a team of a dozen care-
givers, somebody is responsible for onboarding new talent;
somebody is responsible for tracking commercial results; and
somebody is responsible for training.
All of those teams are on a shared platform. If you have a
question—say you are facing some particular patient situation,
and you do not know how to resolve it—you can ask 16,000
people how to do it. Every answer is archived, so anyone can
go in and search the past answers. If you are trying to improve
the performance of your team, you can instantly see what
other people are doing. If you are trying to decide what to do
for your own continuing education, you can scan the recom-
mendations of thousands of your colleagues.
The performance of every team is visible across the entire
network, so you know exactly where you stand as a team.
Are you in the top decile? The bottom decile? How are you
doing?
When you break organizations into small teams, when
people feel a deep sense of ownership within those teams,
when they have all the data they need in order to know
whether they are doing a good job or not, when they can
explore the collective intelligence of the entire network,
you do not need managers. That is how Buurtzorg runs,
and they are better on every dimension of performance
than their peers, by a big margin. And yet, the company
has only two managers—the founder and a deputy. And
they are delivering a highly complex service in a highly
regulated industry.
JE: If your thesis is right, then those companies will out-com-
pete those that are stuck in the old paradigm.
GH: I think that is starting to happen. I am the chief trans-
formation officer at Haier in China, which is more of an
honorary title than a day-to-day job. Haier is an
Conversations
80,000-person company, a world leader in appliances, and
it is using similar principles. And they are out-competing
everyone else in their industry.
Haier divided the organization into 4,000 microenter-
prises. Even internal staff functions are disaggregated into
small, self-standing businesses that have to sell their services
to others in the company to survive. And nobody has to buy
those internal services: at Haier, you can work with internal
R&D or external R&D, internal HR or external HR.
Haier has divided the company into these small business
units, every one of which has very ambitious performance
goals. If you hit those goals, you double or triple your base
pay, so the incentives are very high-powered. Everyone is
thinking like an entrepreneur. The internal coordination is
handled not through layers of managers but through internal
contracting. This very large company has become a swarm
of startups, and they come together and collaborate where
it makes sense. Haier is one of the world leaders in IoT. They
are doing extraordinary things in the Internet of clothing,
with thousands of partners, and they are completely reimag-
ining the entire clothing industry and garment-care industry,
from one end to the other. And they are doing this in a
company that has, depending on how you count, at most
three management layers.
JE: It was a gutsy play on the part of the CEO to create such
an organization.
GH: I met Zhang Ruimin for the first time more than 10
years ago. He came to my office here in California to talk.
He had read my book The Future of Management, and I talked
with him about building a company that was a network or
a platform, not a traditional organization. He asked, “Gary,
has anybody ever done this?” I said, “No,” and he said, “I am
going to go do it.”
He said something that day that I will never forget. He
said, “Gary, our goal is to let every employee become their
own CEO. People are not a means to an end; they are an end
in themselves.”
Ruimin was quoting Immanuel Kant and the categorical
imperative, but it is the most obvious thing to say in the world.
How could you think about people in any other way? He is
farsighted, but he is not the only CEO I know who thinks this
way. It is obvious: you will never feel like an entrepreneur if
you are working in a large, monolithic organization. You will
never feel like an entrepreneur if you are not directly account-
able to customers. Here is the great irony: you have to go to
China to find the most capitalist company in the world.
We are in the midst of a great debate right now around
the future of capitalism. It is a healthy debate to be had, and
there is much that we could change to make capitalism bet-
ter. We need shareholders that have longer-term horizons;
we need some brakes on corporate power and industrial
concentration. But I think that the real problem with capi-
talism is that we do not have enough capitalists. We have
way too many employees and not enough capitalism.
Conversations
What you see companies like Buurtzorg and Haier doing
is turning employees into capitalists. This kind of capitalism
is not about employee stock ownership programs; what really
makes somebody an entrepreneur is to give them the power
to make business decisions. That happens when you give
people a relatively small and compact business unit that feels
like it is theirs, and when you give them a P&L that is mostly
free of corporate allocations. It happens when you train these
employees to think like businesspeople, and when you give
them a significant financial upside. There is no magic; this is
not rocket science. But it is the fundamental alchemy for
turning employees into entrepreneurs.
JE: What is your message to directors of innovation, CTOs,
and leaders of R&D and IT? What can they do to tap into this
new paradigm? Or is it a fool’s errand to attempt big inno-
vation in a bureaucratic organization?
GH: There are three things I would say to technology leaders.
First, redefine your mission! Don’t make your mission just
doing brilliant, new, innovative things, but make it building
a brilliant, innovative organization from end to end. Build
an organization where the entire company is a laboratory
and every individual is an innovator. That means over time
that you will have to shift at least some of your energy from
the world of things to the world of systems and processes.
You will have to spend time building an organization where
innovation is part of everyone’s DNA, not something that is
bolted on to the edges of the organization. This is a big step,
and it is the first leap.
The second leap is to recognize that making innovation
part of everyone’s DNA is going to mean reengineering a
whole set of management processes that were built for the
sake of alignment, discipline, and control. These are still
important, but the new processes have to give equal weight
and equal preference to innovation, creativity, experimen-
tation, and rapid prototyping.
My final advice is to start wherever you are. The way that
we change large, complex systems is not through a massive
top-down reorganization; that simply will not work in this
case. When one is trying to change organizations in ways that
are so radical and still largely unscripted, there are not a lot
We are in the midst of a great
debate right now around the future
of capitalism. It is a healthy debate
to be had, and there is much that
we could change to make
capitalism better.
January—February 2021 | 17

You will have to spend time
building an organization where
innovation is part of everyone’s
DNA, not something that is
bolted on to the edges of the
organization.
of role models to follow. That means that, by definition, what-
ever process we take has to be emergent and exploratory.
What that means to individuals is that they ask themselves,
how do I start hacking the old model from where I am?
Let me give just one conceptual thought and then one
very practical recommendation for proceeding.
We talked earlier about open source. Linus Torvalds, who
created the first Linux kernel, said, “Don’t make the mistake
of thinking that you can design something better than what
you get from massively parallel trial and error with a feed-
back cycle.” That’s true of this kind of organizational change.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can design some-
thing better, top-down, than what you get from massively
parallel trial and error with a feedback cycle.
What does that mean practically? It means that you must
look at your own unit as a laboratory and think in terms of
the new principles that will need to be built into the DNA of
your organization to make this happen. We talk about those
principles in the book—meritocracy, experimentation, open-
ness, and so on. Ask yourself what kind of test you could
design that would help to strengthen or operationalize one
of the principles in your team. Do not wait for somebody else
to do this. Do not assume that you need to ask permission.
Start from where you are.
I will give you an example or two. In one organization,
the basic idea was to involve people in decisions about the
funding of projects through internal crowdfunding. The idea
was, in essence, an internal version of Kickstarter. The team
ran a simple hack—a little experiment, with minimum per-
missions. The department in question was an e-commerce
unit with 60 people. A couple of people went to their boss
and asked for $9,000—$150 a person—to create the funding
pool. Then they commandeered a big wall and told people
that if they had a good idea that was not currently funded,
to fill out this simple little form and put it up on the wall.
Then they said to everybody else, if you want to fund one
of those ideas, write how much you are willing to fund it for,
up to $150. Put your funding on a sticky note and attach it
to the idea. They ran this experiment for 30 days. They got
10 ideas, five of which got enough support to meet their
funding targets. They were very cool ideas that probably
18 | Research-Technology Management
would not have otherwise gotten funded. But that was
enough of a validation that the company built a platform
and extended the experiment across the entire business.
That would have never happened without somebody
deciding to test the idea from where they were in the orga-
nization. There is a lot of learned helplessness in organiza-
tions, I am afraid, even among relatively senior people. We
have to get beyond that learned helplessness and accept that
every single person needs to be a management innovator.
Every single team and unit needs to be a laboratory for
strengthening experimentation, meritocracy, openness, com-
munity—for all the things that we know drive resilience and
innovation. So run your own experiment; try to build a case
for it; help it propagate. It is not that complicated.
Here is an interesting analogy: when Pope Francis became
pontiff, he committed himself to dismantling much of the
Vatican bureaucracy. And his statements were really quite
scathing. He described the bureaucracy as the leprosy of the
church, which is a very powerful word. I do not use any
words like that when I talk about bureaucracy. He said that
he wanted to create a church that was more responsive to
the needs of all of its members around the world.
Someone last year asked him how he was doing, and he
said that he felt like he was trying to clean the sphynx with
a toothbrush. This is not surprising. No leader can build a
truly innovative, resilient organization top-down. It is impos-
sible, because you cannot do it without redistributing power,
and the people who have power are often reluctant to give
it up. You cannot build an innovative company without help-
ing everyone learn how to experiment, without helping
everyone feel like an entrepreneur, without democratizing
the entire conversation about strategy and direction.
As I said at the beginning, if you want to fundamentally
change an organization, you have to build a constituency for
the future that is more powerful than the constituency for
the status quo. And the only way I know of doing that is to
open up the conversation, find the natural change agents,
find people whose emotional equity is invested in the future,
get them involved in this collaborative process, and then
move forward in a way that is both revolutionary and evo-
lutionary, because it has to be both. You cannot blow things
up in a business; you have got to go about the process
carefully.
Over the last couple of decades, we have become very
comfortable with the idea of disruptive innovation. We have
seen examples from Netflix, YouTube, and Uber. Here is my
challenge to the readers of RTM: as radical as these examples
of business innovation are, can you imagine a similarly rad-
ical change in the way your organization is run? Because if
you cannot, you are stuck.
Leaders in innovation have to take the lead here. That
means going out and looking at the new models, understand-
ing the thinking behind them, and asking how they might
conduct experiments in their own organizations. That is how
we will ultimately defeat bureaucracy: it will not be in one
single, Armageddon-like battle; it will happen when each of
us, individually, says “Enough! It is going to start with me.
Conversations
It is going to start on my team. I am going to do something
about this.”
Bureaucracy does not advance absent human intention.
To get ahead, you learn how to negotiate targets, defend your
turf, protect your budgets, elbow rivals out of the way, man-
age up, deflect blame. But almost none of those bureaucratic
behaviors is correlated with creating value. We have created
this shadow game that absorbs an enormous amount of
energy, and that game will not change until some of us decide
that we are not going to play by those rules anymore. To
de-bureaucratize your organization, you need to first make
a commitment to de-bureaucratize yourself.
In Humanocracy, we identify 12 of the classic bureaucratic
behaviors, like managing up and so on. I suggest that every
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CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue: The Speed of Innovation
Research-Technology Management welcomes articles that explore factors shaping the speed of innovation.
Innovation is happening at a faster pace than ever before. New
processes, ways of thinking, and business models are creating
opportunities for companies to use speed to win in the market-
place. Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, simulation,
and concurrent engineering and tighter integration of operations
across functions, are among the practices helping to spur the
speed of innovation. Much knowledge can be gleaned as compa-
nies forge new paths.
RTM is actively seeking papers on the following topics:
• What companies are doing to increase the pace of innovation
and get their products to market more quickly
• How companies are commercializing faster––what they’re
doing, the challenges of these approaches, successes, and
lessons learned
• How companies are using these tools to accelerate the front
end of innovation
• How companies are using tools like simulation and big data to
innovate faster
• How rapid innovation and commercialization are impacting
quality
Conversations
week you do a personal inventory and ask yourself when in
the last week you fell into one of those bureaucratic habits.
Where did you mortgage the future because of lot of short-
term pressure? Where did you make a decision that under-
mined the loyalty and the motivation of people in your group
because of some business pressure?
Start to identify those behaviors, and then be honest
about them. Go to your team and tell them that you do not
want to behave this way. Ask them to hold you accountable.
When we, as individuals, say “Enough!” then we have some
chance to make the system different around us. Like any-
thing else that involves changing a deeply embedded social
system, there is no substitute in the end for moral
courage.
Papers and case studies should highlight specific, firsthand
experiences in companies and provide data on what’s changing,
the adaptations companies are making, the downsides of these
practices, and managerial lessons learned/practical implications.
RTM articles are concise and practice oriented. Ideal submissions
offer concrete examples and data to support theories about
invention and innovation, the management of technology and
capabilities to support innovation, or the process of portfolio
selection and management. Successful submissions will offer
readers practical information they can put to work immediately.
We prefer submissions at around 4,000–4,500 words, although
we will occasionally publish truly groundbreaking pieces as long
as 5,000 words. Articles should be submitted via our Editorial
Manager system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/rtm/
default.aspx. For submission requirements and author’s guide-
lines, visit us at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/urtm20/current.
For more information about this call or to join our email list to receive
notification when calls for papers are released, please email RTM’s
managing editor, Tammy McCausland, at mccausland@iriweb.org.
January—February 2021 | 19
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