May 1, 2015 N.

132

Book Review: Collective Genius

Path for Creative

Breakthrough
Collective Genius reveals the
principles for building an
innovative team or organization
Tim Stevenson

IVE DECIDED TO interrupt my miniseries on

The Power of Servant Managing to share a
review of a recent book on the same subject of
leading innovation. It is called Collective
Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading
Innovation, by Linda A. Hill of Harvard
Business School and coauthors Greg Brandeau,
Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback.
The book presents the results of a multiyear
research project that examined some of the most

innovative companies in the world. They

studied, for example, Pixar, HCL
Technologies, eBay Germany, Google, IBM,
and others. What was exciting and
encouraging to me was to find that their
conclusions mesh perfectly with my own
experience. While Ive never led an
organization close in size to the ones
mentioned, I have led or helped lead three
organizations and countless teams that were
characterized by innovation.
Applications to groups of any size
Heres the encouraging part for you: The
principles for leading an innovative
organization are the same, whether you are

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talking about an international company or a

small team in an office. Reading about these
huge scale models can help you understand
how to apply the kind of leadership in your
sphere that will lead to creativity and
innovation. And thats my purpose in the
current miniseries: To boil down to bite sizes
what you need to know and do to help your
team grow in this direction.
Their findings
1. Leading innovation and what is widely
considered good leadership, we found,
are not the same. (1)
As you probably expect, they found that
leadership is the critical factor for innovative
organizations, but the leadership called for is
different than the conventional image of the
visionary leader; that is, someone who says,
Thats the objective, and heres how were
going to get there. Follow me. Instead,
What we observed across all the diverse
individuals and organizations we studied
was a surprisingly consistent view of the
leaders role in innovation, which can be
expressed this way: Instead of trying to
come up with a vision and make innovation
happen themselves, a leader of innovation
creates a place a context, an environment
where people are willing and able to do
the hard work that innovative problem
solving requires. (3)

These leaders, in other words, are not in the

fray coming up with innovative ideas. They are
facilitators, building a space within which a
diverse group of people can unleash their
creativity. My own term for this is Servant
Managing, as opposed to Authoritative
Managing.
The authors frequently assert that this kind
of leadership is totally different from
conventional expectations of leadership. I

believe, in fact, that they overstate this

distinction, because in their description of how
these leaders actually functioned, they are
frequently seen to be exercising authority in
many ways: They set expectations and goals,
promote values and rules of engagement, and
define boundaries within which the results must
fall. So the real difference is not whether they
use their authority, it is how and when.
Besides the discussion of leadership, which
goes all the way through the book, they also
identify two other critical factors.
2. Leaders Create the Willingness to
Innovate. (69)
The first step is to cultivate the
development of a community, based on
common purpose and shared values. The
authors found that there were four basic values
that all the innovative companies had in
common: bold ambition, collaboration,
learning, and responsibility. (102)
Innovative teams, however, are constantly
under pressure, having to manage ambiguity,
creative tension, and conflict over ideas. They
therefore need rules of engagement for how
they will interact with each other and arrive at
decisions. These create the psychologically
safe environment where people are free to
create. The leaders role is to promote and
protect these rules of engagement.
3. Leaders Create the Ability to Innovate.
(116)
The ability to innovate is for most people
and groups a learned skill. The authors cite
three necessary ingredients (118):

Creative Abrasion the ability to

create a marketplace of ideas, to
generate, refine, and evolve a multitude
of options through discourse, debate,
and even conflict.

Creative Agility the organizational

ability to test and refine ideas through

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quick experiments, reflection, and

adjustment.

Creative Resolution the

organizational ability to make
integrative decisions.

Each of these is spelled out in a complete

chapter, with striking examples.
Implications for developing leaders
For me, one of the most exciting parts of
the book was the Epilogue, subtitled, Where
will we find tomorrows leaders of
innovation?
Ive written extensively on this subject
myself, and it is refreshing and encouraging to
read that these researchers have discovered
through their macro-level view the same
principles that I teach and practice.
The authors pose the opening question
more specifically, Yet, if todays highpotential leaders of innovation dont fit todays
popular conception of a good leader, many of
them will be invisible to current systems for
identifying and developing tomorrows
leaders (225, emphasis mine).
In other words, in the average leadership
development program found in many
organizations, leadership development is more
like a form of continuing education.
Participants are picked based on superficial
criteria of leadership qualities; chiefly, being a
face-man or woman, being an extravert,
and quick to assert themselves in a crowd.
Quieter, less pushy people need not apply.
Notice, the leadership selection process has
already taken place in this scenario.

This book asserts, however, that

successful leaders of innovative groups do not
share the common profile: They were
idealists, yet pragmatists. They were holistic
thinkers, yet action-oriented. They were
generous, yet demanding (226).
How do you find such people? The
authors explain the difficulty:
Think about what most organizations seek
when they try to identify high-potential
candidates for a leadership program. How
many of them look for candidates with
these traits, idealistic, a thinker,
generous, willing to admit
imperfections and ask for help? Yet these
same qualities are the ones we most
frequently see in leaders of innovation.
They are the individuals uniquely willing
and able to create a place where others
can engage in innovative problem-solving.
(227)

So, answering the question in my own

language, you dont pick leaders. If you try,
you will do so by the same old tired criteria,
while at the same time excluding some people
with the greatest leadership potential of all.
Instead, you identify them by creating a field,
a sphere, in which they will reveal themselves
through performance.
Therefore, one of the greatest benefits of
leading an innovative team is actually a side
benefit: the development and discovery of
new leaders for your team or organization.
Im sure its obvious by now that I found
Collective Genius interesting, enlightening,
and stimulating. If you are interested in this
subject, Im sure you will, too. Li

* For more on developing leaders, see the following miniseries:

Leading Insights #104: How Leaders are Really Developed (Feb. 19, 2014)
Leading Insights #105: Determine to Develop People (Mar. 20, 2014)
Leading Insights #106: Design to Develop Leaders (Mar. 26, 2014)
Leading Insights #107: Identifying Emerging Leaders (Apr. 3, 2014)

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