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It is the type of leadership that is the key differentiator for the most innovative companies
True
False
Right !
Some companies are able to innovate continuously, while others are not. To understand why this is, Collective Genius coauthors Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily True Love and Kent Lineback studied innovative organizations from around the world. Their conclusion? “Conventional leadership won’t get you to innovation.” After studying innovative organizations such as India-based IT company HCL Technologies, the marketing division of automaker Volkswagen in Europe, and California-based Pixar Animation Studios, they conclude that effective leadership is the key difference between organizations that can innovate and those that can’t.
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
Wrong !
Some companies are able to innovate continuously, while others are not. To understand why this is, Collective Genius coauthors Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily True Love and Kent Lineback studied innovative organizations from around the world. Their conclusion? “Conventional leadership won’t get you to innovation.” After studying innovative organizations such as India-based IT company HCL Technologies, the marketing division of automaker Volkswagen in Europe, and California-based Pixar Animation Studios, they conclude that effective leadership is the key difference between organizations that can innovate and those that can’t.
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
Developing the collective genius of your teams is about creating and sharing a vision for employees to execute.
True
False
Right !
Having and sharing a vision is, of course, the initial building block but it is not enough in itself to transform your organization into an agile and innovative body. According to the co-authors, conventional leadership stifles innovation. “If the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. By definition, then, leading innovation cannot be about creating and selling a vision to people and then somehow inspiring them to execute it,” explain the coauthors. They point to the co-founder and president of Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, as a prime example of a leader who has increased the innovation capacity of his organization through his understanding of this key insight.
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
Wrong !
Having and sharing a vision is, of course, the initial building block but it is not enough in itself to transform your organization into an agile and innovative body. According to the co-authors, conventional leadership stifles innovation. “If the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. By definition, then, leading innovation cannot be about creating and selling a vision to people and then somehow inspiring them to execute it,” explain the coauthors. They point to the co-founder and president of Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, as a prime example of a leader who has increased the innovation capacity of his organization through his understanding of this key insight.
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
(Source: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Press 2014).
Developing collective genius is a team sport
True
False
Right !
Rather than setting a vision and motivating others to follow it, leaders of innovation recognize that innovation is a “team sport.” Research on innovation has already established that innovation is the result of “iterative learning processes as well as environments that encourage experimentation, critical inquiry, critical debate, and accept failures as a necessary part of the process.” But few organizations have yet to realize how these demands of innovation transform the role of leaders. An organization’s individual team members each possess “slices of genius.” The role of a leader of innovation is to elicit and combine all those individual “slices of geniuses” into “a single work of collective genius.” To put it another way, innovation results not from the “visionary genius” of a few singularly talented individuals, but rather from the collective’s ability to generate, refine, and execute ideas together — an ability that depends strongly on leadership.
Source: “Creating an Innovation Culture: Accepting Failure is Necessary”, by Edward D. Hess (Forbes, June 2012).
Source: “Creating an Innovation Culture: Accepting Failure is Necessary”, by Edward D. Hess (Forbes, June 2012).
Wrong !
Rather than setting a vision and motivating others to follow it, leaders of innovation recognize that innovation is a “team sport.” Research on innovation has already established that innovation is the result of “iterative learning processes as well as environments that encourage experimentation, critical inquiry, critical debate, and accept failures as a necessary part of the process.” But few organizations have yet to realize how these demands of innovation transform the role of leaders. An organization’s individual team members each possess “slices of genius.” The role of a leader of innovation is to elicit and combine all those individual “slices of geniuses” into “a single work of collective genius.” To put it another way, innovation results not from the “visionary genius” of a few singularly talented individuals, but rather from the collective’s ability to generate, refine, and execute ideas together — an ability that depends strongly on leadership.
Source: “Creating an Innovation Culture: Accepting Failure is Necessary”, by Edward D. Hess (Forbes, June 2012).
Source: “Creating an Innovation Culture: Accepting Failure is Necessary”, by Edward D. Hess (Forbes, June 2012).
Collective innovation is often a spontaneous and unconscious act
True
False
Right !
Collective genius is the sum of individual wills; it is not about a group of creative types cut off in a tower of Babel but a community of individuals. First and foremost, it requires everyone to play the game, but, at the same time, innovation is a voluntary act, and nobody can be forced to contribute. For leaders, collective genius requires knowing how to create a thirst for innovation in your teams by building a strong community, sharing a clear vision, and establishing joint rules of engagement.
Wrong !
Collective genius is the sum of individual wills; it is not about a group of creative types cut off in a tower of Babel but a community of individuals. First and foremost, it requires everyone to play the game, but, at the same time, innovation is a voluntary act, and nobody can be forced to contribute. For leaders, collective genius requires knowing how to create a thirst for innovation in your teams by building a strong community, sharing a clear vision, and establishing joint rules of engagement.
Collective genius requires common goals to be set
True
False
Right !
When common goals are clearly defined and shared, the environment gives a sense of security that promotes the exchange of ideas and minimizes the likelihood of inter-personal conflicts. In the past, when resources were scarce and danger imminent, it was natural to come together to tackle threats. Nowadays, with the huge resources that can be found in large companies, it is difficult to recapture the sense of a collective challenge. If you really want to develop collective genius, or to innovate and win the support of your teams, it is up to you to redefine the challenges they face. Growth on its own is too abstract a goal to ignite the human spirit. You have to give your teams a very good reason to engage with others, just like Steve Jobs, who was fond of telling his employees that their mission was to “leave their mark on the universe by adapting technology to life”. A united, unified team focuses primarily on achieving the best possible outcome based on shared goals rather than individual gains or losses.
Source: Leaders Eat Last – Why Some Team Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek, Portfolio 2014
Source: Leaders Eat Last – Why Some Team Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek, Portfolio 2014
Wrong !
When common goals are clearly defined and shared, the environment gives a sense of security that promotes the exchange of ideas and minimizes the likelihood of inter-personal conflicts. In the past, when resources were scarce and danger imminent, it was natural to come together to tackle threats. Nowadays, with the huge resources that can be found in large companies, it is difficult to recapture the sense of a collective challenge. If you really want to develop collective genius, or to innovate and win the support of your teams, it is up to you to redefine the challenges they face. Growth on its own is too abstract a goal to ignite the human spirit. You have to give your teams a very good reason to engage with others, just like Steve Jobs, who was fond of telling his employees that their mission was to “leave their mark on the universe by adapting technology to life”. A united, unified team focuses primarily on achieving the best possible outcome based on shared goals rather than individual gains or losses.
Source: Leaders Eat Last – Why Some Team Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek, Portfolio 2014
Source: Leaders Eat Last – Why Some Team Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek, Portfolio 2014
Collective genius works all the better when there are no operating rules
True
False
Right !
To keep disagreements and tensions from splitting the community apart, you need to define and carefully enforce what the coauthors call “rules of engagement.” These rules govern how people interact and collaborate with each other, and they are designed to discourage unproductive behaviors and keep people focused on what matters: the end result, or the single work of collective genius. “Think of them as the informal behavioral rules or guidelines that support a community as it does the work of innovation,” explain the coauthors, who report that such rules aim to ensure mutual trust and respect for one another, but also to ensure that everyone keeps a critical, analytical and curious mindset.
Wrong !
To keep disagreements and tensions from splitting the community apart, you need to define and carefully enforce what the coauthors call “rules of engagement.” These rules govern how people interact and collaborate with each other, and they are designed to discourage unproductive behaviors and keep people focused on what matters: the end result, or the single work of collective genius. “Think of them as the informal behavioral rules or guidelines that support a community as it does the work of innovation,” explain the coauthors, who report that such rules aim to ensure mutual trust and respect for one another, but also to ensure that everyone keeps a critical, analytical and curious mindset.
Performance is the most important aspect of collective genius
True
False
Right !
Contrary to what most people remember of the innovation process — that the solution appeared out of the blue — research indicates that innovations in fact emerge step-by-step through iterative, trial-and-error experimentation. This form of creative agility again presents key challenges for leaders. The first challenge is striking a delicate balance between supporting learning and development and demanding performance. “While learning and development are important, performance — did you solve the problem? — is what ultimately matters,” they note. “Thus, leaders of innovation encourage people to test and learn from new ideas. But they also demand that people be data driven in their experimentation and performance focused in evaluating results.”
Wrong !
Contrary to what most people remember of the innovation process — that the solution appeared out of the blue — research indicates that innovations in fact emerge step-by-step through iterative, trial-and-error experimentation. This form of creative agility again presents key challenges for leaders. The first challenge is striking a delicate balance between supporting learning and development and demanding performance. “While learning and development are important, performance — did you solve the problem? — is what ultimately matters,” they note. “Thus, leaders of innovation encourage people to test and learn from new ideas. But they also demand that people be data driven in their experimentation and performance focused in evaluating results.”
Performance doesn’t always depend on the best idea
True
False
Right !
The challenge of effective collective genius is to allow ideas to emerge before discussing and refining them via a process of “creative friction” between team members. The ideas are then tested and developed using creative agility. But one step remains: choosing and executing the best idea that has emerged. “The best innovative solutions often combine ideas, including ideas once considered mutually exclusive,” the coauthors report. They call this ability to integrate a variety of perspectives and ideas into one solution creative resolution and report that, although it is a key concern of all the leaders they studied, unfortunately it occurs infrequently. “Most decisions are little more than the simple selection of one option, to the exclusion of all others, or some sort of splitting the difference between alternatives.”
Wrong !
The challenge of effective collective genius is to allow ideas to emerge before discussing and refining them via a process of “creative friction” between team members. The ideas are then tested and developed using creative agility. But one step remains: choosing and executing the best idea that has emerged. “The best innovative solutions often combine ideas, including ideas once considered mutually exclusive,” the coauthors report. They call this ability to integrate a variety of perspectives and ideas into one solution creative resolution and report that, although it is a key concern of all the leaders they studied, unfortunately it occurs infrequently. “Most decisions are little more than the simple selection of one option, to the exclusion of all others, or some sort of splitting the difference between alternatives.”
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