Leading Innovation is the Art of
Creating ‘Collective Genius’
As Linda Hill sees it, innovation
requires its own brand of leadership. The coauthor of the new book Collective
Genius discusses what's been learned from 16 of the best business
innovators.
As Harvard Business School Professor Linda A. Hill began
to dig into the scholarship around leadership and innovation, she soon realized
there was a lot of research on both.
What she didn't find, however, was
work linking the two. Specifically, what is the role of the leader in creating
and sustaining an innovative organization? A new book written with three
coauthors attempts to answer the question of why some companies, such as Pixar,
are able to invent continuously, while others aren't.
“Conventional leadership won't get you to innovation”
The
book, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading
Innovation,
was written by Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business
Administration, with Greg Brandeau, former CTO of The Walt Disney Studios and
current COO/president of Media Maker; Emily Truelove, a PhD candidate at MIT's
Sloan School of Management; and Kent Lineback, Hill's cowriter on Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Good
Leader.
What most distinguishes innovation
leadership, the book argues, is recognition that innovation is a "team
sport," not the act of a sole inventor. "Truly innovative groups are
consistently able to elicit and then combine members' separate slices of
genius into a single work of collective genius," the authors
write.
Or, as Hill puts it,
"Conventional leadership won't get you to innovation."
The authors identified organizations
with reputations for being highly innovative, then found 16 leaders within
those organizations and studied how they worked.
Determined to feature a global
perspective, the authors include narratives of executives within India-based IT
company HCL Technologies, the German division of online auctioneer eBay, and
the marketing division of automaker Volkswagen in Europe.
Willing
to take chances
In a chapter devoted to how
executives can create the ability to innovate in their group, the authors
explore how Pixar's Brandeau, eBay's Philipp Justus, and Google's Bill Coughran
use discussion, conflict, and trial and error to advantage.
At Pixar, for example, the company
was caught up short in 2008 in a clash over production schedules for the movie Up
and the short film Cars Toons. Blindsided by news that Cars Toons
was behind schedule, coauthor Brandeau had to figure out how to finish both
projects on time with limited computing resources while also limiting friction
among the forces.
The crazy solution: Brandeau asked
Disney Animation (Disney bought Pixar in 2006) if the studio could borrow 250
computers, an idea someone initially called "insane." The team
trucked the computers 360 miles from Burbank, California, to Emeryville, near
San Francisco, setting the systems up over a weekend. The move worked and the studio
hit both deadlines. The book cites short-term innovation, in the decision to
borrow the computers, and the team's ability to creatively resolve conflict, as
marks of innovative leadership.
At eBay Germany, the authors found
examples of how a maturing company like eBay can retain its innovative spirit.
For a holiday promotion, a young project manager and his marketing colleagues
launched a "treasure hunt," working nonstop to launch registration
pages, clues, and an hourly countdown clock. Trouble was, the launch violated
eBay's well-established corporate project-development processes. When the
treasure hunt began, 10 million contestants logged on, crashing the local
servers.
Justus, eBay's senior VP in charge
of Europe, could have stopped this and other similar
"micro-projects," but instead he decided to pursue them and fly under
the radar of corporate headquarters. Successful innovations emerged, such as an
Easy Lister feature, and separate registration processes for private and
business sellers. Later, Justus shared the successes with then CEO Meg Whitman,
which led to a global micro-projects strategy.
With eBay, Hill says, the authors
wanted to show how Whitman's willingness to experiment with rapid prototyping
"broke rules to get something done," and modeled such behavior for
the entire organization.
Collective Genius shows how Bill Coughran, Google's then senior vice
president of engineering, created an environment where engineers could figure
out on their own how to best address the company's massive storage challenges
in 2006. The problem: Storage issues were created by the huge amount of data
processed by the Google File System, (GFS), designed for Google web searches.
One team, called Big Table, argued
for adding systems on top of GFS; the other team, called Build from Scratch,
wanted to replace GFS entirely. Coughran decided to give the two teams space to
defend their ideas, letting them collect data and test rigorously. The Build
from Scratch team eventually realized its system wouldn't meet the company's
requirements, but members were assigned to work on a next-generation system and
many of those ideas were eventually used.
Coughran gave the teams the room
they needed to create a resolution, the mark of a leader who lets innovation
happen, Hill says. He also never tried to be the visionary, the expert, or the
decisive "I'm in charge," leader, she says. Instead he asked
difficult and probing questions during regular review meetings that helped
frame issues and sharpen discussions.
"He wasn't passive," Hill
says. "He was weighing two things and letting them play out."
Companies often make the mistake of
compromising too early or letting one or two groups dominate. "He allowed
both ideas to be developed and tested enough, to learn and not combine them
right away," Hill says. "He let them play it out. His job as leader
was to figure out when to step in."
THE
"YOUNG SPARKS"
Of the 16 leaders studied, Hill says
Delhi-based HCL, under former CEO Vineer Nayar, might be the boldest. Nayar,
who pulled the company out of a five-year slump, challenged the common belief
that Indian companies provide low-cost products and services but don't
innovate. "That (assumption) made him crazy," Hill says. "He
said 'We can and will compete that way.' "
Nayar focused on changing the
organization from within, starting by empowering employees. In 2005, he told a
team of 30-something young employees called the "Young Sparks" to
develop the brand and a plan to change how employees experienced HCL. The group
started with an icon, Thambi, which means "brother" in Tamil,
symbolizing "the importance of the individual and the value of the
collective" at HCL.
Nayar recast his role as leader. He
pushed for more transparency, adding 360-degree reviews for all employees and
360-degree feedback of his own work—he promised to resign if his own review
dropped to a certain level. He set up a portal that asked employees to solve
"my problems" and reported getting incredible answers from workers.
From 2005 to 2013, when Nayar led
HCL as president and then CEO, the company's sales, market cap, and profits
increased six fold, according to the book. Fortune magazine wrote that
the HCL had "the world's most modern management" and the company was
named one of Businessweek's most influential companies.
Nayar tells people, "I don't
know the answers," which goes against the common belief in Indian business
that the CEO should be a visionary. For Hill, Nayar shows the possibilities of
what can be accomplished by an innovative leader who embraces a new style of
leadership.
Since finishing the book, Hill has
been traveling, meeting with business and organizational leaders about how to
implement the team's leadership ideas at different management levels.
"We're meeting with a lot of
interesting people to try to figure this out," she says.
by Kim Girard http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7431.html
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