Competing for the Future by Hamel & Prahalad: Book Review

Introduction to Competing for the Future

Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad brings into focus the discussion of effective strategic management as a path toward establishing efficient organizations and companies for the future. The book's objective is to create frameworks through which leaders — specifically managers — can help chart a course toward developing an effective strategic plan for their organizations. The path toward the future, however, should not be misconstrued as a race in which organizations or companies must all participate in the same way. What Hamel and Prahalad brought into focus is the distinctive nature of that race, aptly stated in the book (25):

"There is not one future but hundreds. There is no law that says most companies must be followers. Getting to the future first is not just about outrunning competitors bent on reaching the same prize. It is also about having one's own view of what the prize is. There can be as many prizes as runners … In business … what distinguishes leaders from laggards, and greatness from mediocrity, is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be."

Strategic Vision and Imagining the Future

Given this central thesis, the authors begin their discussion by making it clear that in strategic planning, members of an organization must have a vision — the ability to imagine things beyond the scope of current reality. Organizations and companies must also "dream," creating ambitions that have not always been considered realistic, yet are feasible enough to be accomplished provided the strategy is well thought out and effectively implemented (145). This emphasis on imaginative ambition is one of the book's most distinctive contributions to strategic thinking.

Resource Leverage and Organizational Participation

It is vital to consider that the process toward establishing an effective strategic plan requires bringing together all members of the organization. Delegating the task to a specific group alone would represent a failure of foresight on the part of managers. The authors recommend that, for full participation among organizational members to be possible, managers should plan to educate each member about the whole process by which the organization operates (146). Re-educating members and employees ensures that they understand how the organization works and can offer suggestions or recommendations that benefit not only one department or sector, but the organization as a whole.

This process illustrates the authors' view of what resource leverage should mean: an acknowledgment of the organization's existing resources and what new resources can be generated from them. Leverage on resources may be accomplished through converging, targeting, mining, blending, balancing, recycling, co-opting, and protecting those resources (160–173).

Conclusion

Integrating together the authors' recommendations, Competing for the Future illuminates how managers bear the foremost responsibility of creating strategies that incorporate the book's central ideas. This includes creating the "big dream," opening up to the possibility that ambitious goals propel companies and organizations to the forefront of the race toward the future, re-educating employees and members about the organization's daily operations, and identifying core competencies in preparation for the creation of a core competence agenda. Together, these elements form a coherent and practical vision of what forward-looking strategic management should look like.

Work Cited

Hamel, G. and C.K. Prahalad. (1994). Competing for the Future. MA: Harvard Business School Press.