In the era of Big Science (1900-1950), science was like a big elephant dragging a log through a jungle in Thailand. Good results were achieved when science did the heavy work to crack the code.

In the era that followed, the era of Big Brands, brands were like the trainer at Sea World, training Shamu to balance a ball on the end of its nose. Good results were achieved through coaxing and conditioning.

In the era just beginning, the era of Big Ideas, ideas are like the gazelles you see in wildlife videos, pronking through the tall grass of the Serengeti, getting a fresh glimpse of its surroundings with every leap.

Never mind what Francis Fukuyama said to us several years ago at the second Tomorrowday. We are not standing at the end of history, said Gary Hamel. The contest between ideas will go on. Indeed, ferocious competition is bearing down on us right now. Only a very bind or very foolish organization sees smooth sailing for the future.

Hamel used the metaphor of roast pig. At some point in history, a pig wandered into a hut, started a fire, and was found roasted in the ruins. This was a nonlinear innovation, requiring genius on the pig's part and on the part of the person who tasted it. But luck played an important role. Incremental, linear innovations -- like using an oven instead of burning your house down every time you had a hankering for bacon -- came later.

"Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink," Hamel said. "The same goes for same with strategies. How many organization carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?"

Change itself has changed, Hamel insisted -- the pace of it is exponentially faster than it was in the Big Brands era. Motorola missed the shift to wireless technology by only a year, but in so doing lost a strategic war to Nokia.

He told how Marz & Spencer, a UK food company, once walked away from the ready-to-eat sandwich market, which is huge in Britain, on account of sandwich-making being too labor-intensive. But a nonlinear innovation occurred -- the discovery that you could apply butter and condiments using a silkscreen machine. Out-of-loaf thinking -- can you do it?

You can catch up with nonlinear competition, if you start catching up the moment you realize you are falling behind. To dawdle is to die.

Hamel's remarks on strategic convergence harked back to his thoughts five years ago about "genetic diversity" within an organization.

A poll of executives showed that newcomers took the most advantage of changes within their industry. How did they succeed in the game? By taking charge and changing the rules by which it was played.

While the newcomers rewrite the rules, the oldtimers attend to the same conferences, read the same literature, and benchmark the same (last year's) companies.

We used to demand an improvement on last year's performance. Then we demanded that our stock beat the S&P 500. Then we insisted our companies lead their industry. Then we undertook benchmarking our best peers. Most recently we turned to EVA, as if the cost of capital constituted a revolutionary new metric to people.

"I'm not making this [stuff] up," Hamel said, shaking his head.

What good is all this linear knowledge? In Hamel's mind, it infects us with orthodoxies that our own eyes tell us are obsolete.

Hamel spun out an elaborate dazzling metaphor for understanding organizations -- comparing organizational strategy work to human genetics.

• All human variation, and all organizational growth is the product of genetic differentiation -- of internal diversity.
• Human beings are 99% alike genetically. All that differentiates us is in that single innovative 1%.
• The basic DNA of a person is immortal -- it long outlives the individual. "A chicken is how one egg produces another egg." -- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
• Hypercompetition -- everyone selling the same thing made the same way -- is the organization equivalent of inbreeding, and reflects absence of variety.
• Genes mutate. (As do ideas.)
• There is good genetic variety and bad genetic variety. Having a strategy, even a very bold strategy, is no plus if it loses $250 million.
• In natural selection, only good variety is retained. If your organization ends up with bad variety, your selection process was aberrant!

Hamel studied hundreds of organization that have spawned certifiably good variety, and created the following list of traits.

• Have we developed a coherent point of view about the future of our industry?
• Have we written down a declaration of beliefs, a manifesto?
• Have we created a coalition of allies?
• Have we carefully picked the ramparts we intent to assail?
• Have we coopted and neutalized the anti-change forces within our midst?
• Have we found a translator who can put into motivating words for different constituencies the terms of the revolution?
• Have we set achievable goals -- winning small, winning early, and winning often?
• Have you curbed the Stalinist practice of corporate resource allocation, and replaced it with but resource attraction -- a critical distinction!