"Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot?"
You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help--but there's only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to "lead" it--and with a special kind of leadership. "Collective Genius" shows you how.
Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and "Being the Boss" coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.
Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don't create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again--an environment where people are both "willing" and "able" to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires.
"Collective Genius" will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Are you the boss you need to be?

You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from your subordinates, from those above you, and from your peers and customers.

You're not alone. As Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and manager and executive Kent Lineback reveal in Being the Boss, becoming an effective manager is a painful, difficult journey. It requires trial and error, endless effort, and slowly acquired personal insight. Many managers never complete the journey and instead just learn how to get by. At worst, they become terrible bosses.

This essential book, now with a new preface, explains how to avoid that fate by mastering three imperatives:

- Manage yourself: Learn that management isn't about doing all the work on your own. It's about leading others to accomplish things with you as their guide.

- Manage your network: Understand how power and influence work in your organization, and build a network of mutually beneficial relationships to navigate your company's complex political environment

- Manage your team: Create a high-performing "we" out of all the "I's" who report to you.

Packed with compelling stories and practical advice, Being the Boss is an indispensable guide not only for first-time managers but for all managers seeking to master the most daunting challenges of leadership.

The logical and enduring way to innovate. Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage. This distinctive approach has three key elements: It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive. The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose. Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way. In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges. Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.