The management guru Gary Hamel has had more Harvard Business Review articles reprinted more often than anyone else - 15 and counting.  He’s a visiting professor at the London Business School, the founder of a new venture called MLab, which seeks to “accelerate the evolution of management knowledge and practice,” the author of several seminal books on management, including The Future of Management, Competing for the Future, and Leading the Revolution (which unfortunately recommended Enron) -- and the inventor of the idea of core competencies.  The Wall Street Journal recently said he was the world’s most influential business thinker. 

In short, he’s one of the top biz gurus.  But how good a speaker is Gary Hamel?

You can see him here, http://tinyurl.com/2vypya, speaking to Fortune management innovation, and here, at something called the leadership summit 2009:  http://tinyurl.com/y9kgwbj.

Gary is all energy.  He’s probably the best ranter in the top ten business speakers.  But he lacks polish.  The effect is of a rather over-earnest high school social studies teacher shouting to keep students’ attention and afraid that he’s about to lose them.  The performance is initially arresting, but it grows wearisome after a bit.  Hamel has two levels, loud and not loud.  That soon becomes annoying.  And his diction is so mushy as to be inarticulate at times when he throws the end of a sentence away.

He leaps around the stage, pacing back and forth, in his desire to get the message across.  But he’d be much better served by developing some nuances, some variety in his delivery, and some purpose to his wanderings. 

And yet, when he says, for companies today, it’s “not about efficiency, it’s about irrelevancy” he’s so right that it’s scary.  Hamel is hard to watch for long periods of time, but ignore him at your peril.  He may have been wrong abut Enron, but he’s right about the need for businesses to innovate or die.