.

If you're after the actual quote...

I'm confident about the first part, although it actually appears to be part of a quote from from Gary Hamel's co-author, Prahalad - see Note [5] below, where Prahalad's comment is refers to Gary Hamel's comment posted above it (here).



Companies are going to have to unlearn a lot of their past – and also to forget it! The future will not be an extrapolation of the past. Like a space rocket on the way to moon, a company has to be willing to jettison the parts of its past which no longer contain fuel for the journey which are becoming, in effect, excess baggage. That is particularly difficult for the senior managers – those who had actually built the past, and who still have a lot of emotional equity invested in it.[5]

...


[5] Prahalad goes on to say (Gibson, p72) that: “ If you want to escape the gravitational pull of the past, you have to be willing to challenge your own orthodoxies, to regenerate your core strategies and rethink your most fundamental assumptions about how you are going to compete.” This is what has been referred to as the need for engaging in ‘double loop learning’ processes -- shared inquiry where fundamental questioning of beliefs and understanding is questioned and improved. Unfortunately, I agree with Prahalad when he says: “ Mostly often it takes a crisis before a company is willing to do that. It takes a sense of urgency, a sense that the company’s future success is not inevitable.”