How to be a great leader
We asked the brightest minds in business how they do what they do – and how you can cash in on their advice in the year ahead.
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Gary Hamel
Gary Hamel
Management consultant; author, Leading the Revolution
Keep Unlearning to Stay Smart
As change accelerates, so does the danger of holding on too tightly to yesterday's certainties - a lesson that many senior executives have yet to learn. Again and again I've seen great companies laid low by their reverence for precedent. Nokia, for example, created a big opening for Samsung when it was slow to question its long-held belief in the design superiority of "candy bar" shaped phones (vs. the two-piece flip-phones preferred by Asian customers).

To keep learning, you constantly must keep unlearning. First, this requires an effort to identify precisely those beliefs that seem most indisputable; usually that means beliefs that are the most widely held. Second, it demands a continuous search for disconfirming evidence. For example, like most B-school professors, I long accepted the notion that big companies can't manage without managers. After all, in any complex undertaking there are lots of things that need managing - and who else to do this work but, well, managers. Then I started looking for counterexamples, like the open-source movement. According to Sourceforge.net, there are currently over 1.4 million volunteers contributing to more than 130,000 open-source projects, with nary a manager in sight. Turns out you don't always need managers to aggregate human effort in productive ways - a revelation that undoubtedly came as a bit of a shock to a legion of project managers at Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and other software incumbents.
 What do you think it will take in 2007 to succeed in business? E-mail the editors here.
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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.