the] primary challenge is to become the architect of industry transformation/'

Technical people have an enormous responsibility, he stressed, to ensure that their organization "never acts like an incumbent/7 To fundamentally "re-conceive" itself, a company has to re­generate its core competencies and strategies. "In most companies, strate­gic planning has been elitist, top down, reductionist, and very seldom leads to any real creative insight," he said.

The least "genetic diversity" often is found at the top of a corporate hierar­chy, according to Hamel. "If any popu­lation of organisms doesn't have enough genetic diversity, it will die," he ex­plained, using genetics as an example for the assumptions, biases, prejudices, and conventions ingrained in how a company operates.

Opportunities will come, he said, from individuals willing to speculate, think abstractly and creatively, show curiosity and interest, learn from other examples and draw analogies, and ask stupid questions. "Every company has to get involved in the managerial equivalent of gene replacement therapy and develop a foresightful view of the future," said Hamel. "Most of all, we need to bring fundamentally new voices into the strat­egy process and give a disproportionate share of voice to three constituents in an organization—young people, those on the geographic periphery [away from headquarters], and newcomers."

Ann Thayer

CIRCLE 19 ON READER SERVICE CARD JUNE 26,1995 C&EN 19

Key to competition tied to innovative thinking "It has never been more important for a company to have a proactive, prescient point of view about where its new op­portunities are going to lie," according to Gary Hamel, professor of strategic and international management at Lon­don Business School.

As a keynote speaker at a recent con­ference entitled "Technology Manage­ment Horizons: Fueling Growth and Driving Change," Hamel challenged technology managers from a wide range of industries to look beyond their tradi­tional roles of directing research or tech­nology development. The conference was cosponsored by Menlo Park, Calif.-based consulting and research firm SRI International and the San Francisco-based law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison.

"I see your responsibility not simply being technology leadership, but pro­moting the foresight in your organiza­tions that will let you get to the future first," Hamel said. "And the traditional mechanisms for strategic and technology planning are not going to be of great help." What is needed is innovative, for­ward-looking, and creative thinking to compete in the constantly changing and increasingly complex industrial world he described. Companies that have been struggling to keep up should instead be breaking away from the pack.

After recent and often painful re­structuring and reengineering efforts,

companies now are hoping to exploit technology for competitive advantage and to link technology and business strategies. The chemical industry is one of the U.S/s oldest technology-based industries, said Allen Phipps, senior vice president at SRI International, and the industry's need for technological advancement to fuel growth and re­newal has not changed.

In looking at reengineering, Hamel told the conference that restructuring and reengineering have created what he described as a generation of "denomina­tor managers" in U.S. companies—indi­viduals who, when charged with in­creasing the ratio of net income to assets and head count, work on decreasing the denominator because it's easier.

Among the list of the "downsizing champions," Hamel said that, sadly, many firms—Unisys, DuPont, Mon­santo, Westinghouse, and Honeywell among them—have had rich techno­logical heritages but nevertheless failed to escape the reengineering trend.

But he agreed with proponents of re-engineering who say that it is impor­tant for companies to become more ef­ficient and better at what they do, and that downsizing is "inevitable and nec­essary." But "getting smaller and get­ting better are not going to be enough. The laggards are worrying about orga­nizational transformation . . . [whereas

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