Revolt or Perish -- INTERVIEW: GARY HAMEL

MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, German software giant SAP sat atop the booming worldwide market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Today, startups like Dallas-based i2 Technologies and Ariba in Sunnyvale, Calif., are zooming past SAP to capture the Web-based market for linking customers and suppliers. SAP's mistake? It didn't grab an opportunity that lay just beyond its field of vision.

Although SAP is by no means a corporate graybeard, having soared from anonymity in the 1990s to dominate the ERP market, it fell into the same trap as many large companies. As business "" strategist Gary Hamel writes in his new book, Leading the Revolution (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000), SAP was so busy riding its existing business model, it forgot to stay alert for the next bend in the road. "In the age of revolution, opportunities come and go at light speed," Hamel says. "Blink and you've missed a billion-dollar bonanza."

Perhaps SAP became hooked on its own rhetoric -- that automating internal operations and wringing every spare dollar out of an existing business model is a worthwhile goal in itself. As stockholders for mainstream companies like Campbell Soups, Dow Chemical or RJR Nabisco are discovering, such streamlining tactics go only so far. The name of the game today is radical innovation, according to Hamel. Without an entirely new approach to creating innovative business concepts and generating new wealth, companies are going to be left in the dust of the e-industry stampede, and so are any CIOs who mistake technological innovation for the real thing.

Hamel, a slightly built 45-year-old with longish-gray hair and tortoiseshell glasses, hardly looks the revolutionary part. He runs his own consultancy, Strategos in Menlo Park, Calif., and is affiliated with the London Business School. When he travels, he stays at the best hotels and dines at the fanciest restaurants. However, when Hamel starts talking about the need for corporate change -- as he recently did with Senior Editor Alison Bass over breakfast at the Four Seasons' Fifty Seven Fifty Seven Restaurant -- he speaks with the fervor of a zealot, a zealot who knows there's no time to waste.

CIO: Your book talks about companies that are riding a dying business model and don't even know it. How can companies recognize that they're about to get kicked in the pants by an upstart competitor before it happens?

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