Leadership for Innovation: How to Create Collective Genius

• Why some pioneering leaders don’t read leadership books.

• How shared purpose, values and trust drive ambitious organizations.

• The benefits to company culture in "leading from behind."

What kind of leadership is needed when innovation is your competitive advantage? From her research on companies that have achieved breakthrough innovations, Professor Hill found a common leadership approach. Leaders at Pixar, eBay Germany, Google, HCL Technologies, and IBM, among others, build communities of people who are both “willing and able to innovate.” They develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose, values, and rules of engagement. And they build capabilities by fostering intellectual diversity and debate (creative abrasion), high experimentation (creative agility), and integrative—rather than compromise-driven—solutions (creative resolution).

Steve Jobs, for example, after acquiring Pixar, put tremendous design effort into a new facility for hundreds of employees, designing it much like an Italian neighborhood with a central meeting place, to foster a highly collaborative community. Vineet Nayar, CEO of India’s IT leader, HCL Technologies, introduced an “Employee First” mantra and encouraged the company’s young employees to define their value system and goals, building an ambitious, trust-based community.

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. She is the author of Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership. Dr. Hill received her BA in Psychology from Bryn Mawr College, and an MA in Educational Psychology and PhD in Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago.