Was Steve Jobs a Good Decision Maker?

Jobs holding a white iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Davenport for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

The world continues to honor and mourn Steve Jobs weeks after his death, and there is plenty to praise. His legacy lives on in today’s iCloud and iOS 5 availability, and in the new iPhone 4S being praised by several prominent technology reviewers. David Pogue, my favorite technology writer, is so enthusiastic as to call the new phone’s features almost magical.

I’ve long admired Apple products, too. By my count there are six Macbooks, two iPads, and three iPhones—not to mention a few iPods—in my family’s possession. If you judge only by the product outcomes or by Apple’s market value, Jobs seems the best decision-maker in the history of consumer products.

But of course, like every other human, his decisions weren’t all great. In the 1980s he hired John Sculley to succeed himself as CEO of Apple, and Sculley presided over a period of slow growth and product missteps in the ensuing years. Jobs commented about Sculley: “What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for, starting with me.” Jobs’ major startup during his hiatus from Apple, NeXT Computer, was largely unsuccessful — at least in the hardware business. His decision to sell all of his Apple stock when Sculley pushed him out cost him billions. And when he came back as CEO, he allowed the backdating of stock options.

In terms of decision processes and style, Jobs was famous for being a tough micro-manager, at least where product design decisions are concerned. As a Fortune magazine article on Apple’s culture put it: “He’s a corporate dictator who makes every critical decision—and oodles of seemingly noncritical calls too, from the design of the shuttle buses that ferry employees to and from San Francisco to what food will be served in the cafeteria.”

He also didn’t believe in analytical decisions based on extensive market research. From The New York Times‘ obituary: ”Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Based on the evidence, I will grant that he made some fantastic design decisions, but not that he was an expert on effective decision processes.

Granted, there is some evidence that even Jobs came to realize the shortcomings of one man’s intuition as the only source of decision wisdom. In a summary of a 1997 interview, a New York Times article published earlier this year noted: “In his early years at Apple, before he was forced out in 1985, Mr. Jobs was notoriously hands-on, meddling with details and berating colleagues. But later, first at Pixar, the computer-animation studio he co-founded, and in his second stint at Apple, he relied more on others, listening more and trusting members of his design and business teams.”

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and has taught at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. He is a widely published author and speaker on the topics of analytics, information and knowledge management, reengineering, enterprise systems, and electronic business. He has written over 100 articles for such publications as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications, and has been a columnist for Information Week, CIO, and Darwin magazines. His latest of a dozen books is Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right, co-authored with Brook Manville and published Harvard Business Review Press (2012). To check out Tom’s other blog posts, please click here.

 

 

6 Lessons We Could Learn from Steve Jobs

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Margaret Heffernan for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

*     *     *

Tracking the achievements of Steve Jobs isn’t a difficult thing to do. They’re big, public and – especially in technology – remarkably long lasting. More tricky but, I think, more interesting, is eliciting from those achievements the lessons we could learn from his successes if we tried.

[Here are the first three of the six lessons.]

1. Style is Content

From the outset, Jobs and Apple believed in style: in fonts, in graphics, in industrial design and in marketing. It’s easy to under-estimate how eccentric this was at the time – and how eccentric it remains today. While most organizations believe that style is the exclusive purview of marketing, few achieve it even there. Most hardware and software remains remarkably clunky, ugly or simply derivative. (The Kindle is hideous; the Fire a pale imitation.) When I first started working in technology 15 years ago, style was dismissed as frivolous and that’s the status it still holds in most companies today. Anyone who imagines that Apple’s success derives entirely from what’s inside the box  (and there are more than a few) has missed a very obvious point.

Conventional wisdom divides thinking into the left brain and the right brain. The left is all systematic, rational, linear while the right is more emotional and creative. What Jobs demonstrated was that success lies not in emphasizing one over the other but in bringing them together. The physical representation of this was clear when he took over Pixar. The new campus planned 3 separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. He insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the center – because that’s where everyone meets and talks.

2. Patience Beats Speed

For all that Apple is known for fast product development, the truth is that Jobs was very good at waiting. After his return to Apple in 1997, when the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, he did what any smart CEO would do: slashed product lines (15 desktop models to 1) cut software and hardware engineers, eliminated peripherals, reduced inventory and retailers and moved most manufacturing offshore. There is nothing brilliant about this; it’s textbook stuff. But asked in 1998, by Richard Rumelt, what he was going to do next, in order to move Apple beyond its fragile niche position, Jobs had a gutsy answer: “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”

Wait? In a technology business? That took courage. Of course, once he’d figured out what the next big thing was, Jobs was methodical and patient – again – in putting in place everything he’d need to take advantage of the seismic shift in the environment when the U.S. market moved to broadband.

It’s also worth remembering that, during the three years he did this, he was remorselessly hammered by industry analysts not one of whom understood what he was up to.

3. Drama Trumps Romance

Jobs’s product launches were famed for their drama. But one thing they didn’t offer was romance. The products did what they said they’d do. Marketing commentary around them didn’t promise fantasies, illusions or daydreams. Apple promoted its products but didn’t hype them. This may seem a lackluster quality but it built trust. Apple said its products were easy to use not because (like many of its competitors) it hoped that was true, or because it was true for the PhD engineers who’d invented them, but because it was true. It seems peculiar to celebrate a company for truth in advertising but that’s one reason why Apple customers, once smitten, stayed loyal.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Margaret Heffernan worked for 13 years as a producer for BBC Radio and Television before running her first company. She has since been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom, including InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She has been named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her books include The Naked Truth, How She Does It: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success, and recently published Willful Blindness. She has appeared on NPR, CNN, CNBC, and the BBC, and writes for Real Business,The Huffington Post, and Fast Company.

 

Breaking Away: A book review by Bob Morris

Breaking Away: How Great Leaders Create Innovation That Drives Sustainable Growth – and Why Others Fail
Jane Stevenson and Bilal Kaafarani
McGraw-Hill (2011)

How and why to create a “magic mix” of innovation leadership with innovation processes

Year after year, annual lists of the most highly creative organizations include “the usual suspects”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Nike, Pixar, Twitter, etc. With all due respect to these exemplars and to various authors who have much of value to say about innovation processes or the environment for it that effective leaders have established and sustained, no book (to the best of my knowledge) thoroughly examines both environment and leadership…until now.

According to Jane Stevenson and Bilal Kaafarani, there is a “magic mix” that enables some leaders to create a “sustainable innovation engine” within their organization. “In Breaking Away, we’ll look at why this happens and how to achieve different types of innovation success.” More specifically, these are among the key questions to which they respond:

o  Why do some innovation leader succeed but most fail?
o  Why do some workplace environments nourish and support innovation but most don’t?
o  What is the innovation risk profile and why is it so important?
o  What are the quality parameters within which to create “customer evangelists”?

Note: Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba devised the term, “customer evangelists.” Revealingly, the process of creating them involves the same core values as does the process for creating employee (or stakeholder) “evangelists.” Hmmmm…..

o  Which cultural factors are essential to a workplace environment in which innovation thrives?
o  Which cultural factors preclude establishing or sustaining one?
o  What are the defining characteristics and unique abilities of the most effective innovation leaders?

To their great credit, Stevenson and Kaafarani identify and explain a multiple of options and considerations (e.g. “an elegantly simple model that reveals four types of innovation that can lead to growth”) with regard to the interdependence of innovation environment and leadership. They view “leadership” in two separate but essential dimensions: having the vision and authority to do whatever must be done to establish and sustain (if necessary, to protect) an environment in which the innovation process thrives, and, taking initiative at all levels (i.e. transformational, category, marketplace, and operational) and in all areas of the given enterprise. That is, innovative people “make it happen” because their leaders have ensured that it can “happen.”

With regard to this book’s title, as Stevenson and Kaafarani demonstrate in Part 3 (“The Payoff: Activating Growth”), it refers to the process by which to activate innovation in ways that (a) reduce or at least distribute risks and consequent costs and meanwhile (b) increase and improve the chances for breakthrough innovation. “At its heart,” they explain, “innovation is about how to break away from the pack and master the marketplace, using the best employees, technology, business heritage, and resources – all driven by the needs of the customer.”

However different they may be in most respects, all great innovative organizations share this in common: they “create innovation that drives sustainable growth” in marketplaces in which their competitors don’t.

Lessons to be learned from Steve Jobs

Josh Linkner

Everyone seems to have lots of opinions about Steve Jobs. I never met him or worked for him. I’ve seen videos of him, notably his commencement address at Stanford. Also,  I know people who knew him and worked for him. Among my friends are those who have written books and articles about him. It would be presumptuous of me, however, to suggest what lessons can be learned from him. There are others who are well-qualified to do so. Josh Linkner is a case in point. The author of Disciplined Dreaming, he is also the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners and the Founder, Chairman and former CEO of ePrize.

Here’s what Josh thinks about his friend, Steve Jobs:

He’s been called the modern day Thomas Edison, the Beethoven of business, and the most prolific visionary since Henry Ford.  Yet as Steve Jobs steps down from the helm of Apple, he has left us with so much more than incredible technology.

Jobs completely transformed the industries of personal computing, digital animation (Pixar), music, mobile phones, and now tablets.  He created the most valuable company in the world and impacted the way billions of people live their daily lives.  But beyond his accomplishments, he’s taught us lessons in leadership and life.  The characteristics he embodied can serve as a roadmap for us all to become better in business, community, family, and personal achievement.

For all us kids from 1 to 92, Steve’s guiding principles can help us live our best life and make the biggest difference:

1) Put Passion First – He followed his heart and let the operational details fall into place.  He refused to put a governor on his burning desire to reach new heights.

2) Never Limit Your Imagination – He always imagined the ideal solution or product and never cut corners or watered down his most potent ideas due to setbacks or fear.

3) Pursue Greatness over Money – Steve didn’t chase the mighty dollar.  Rather, he focused on making the biggest possible impact and the money followed.

4) Demand Excellence – Critics complain of his exacting style and “unrealistic” demands.  There’s a natural gravitational force of mediocrity, and sometimes it takes an aggressive stance to rise above the sea of sameness.

5) Put Yourself Out of Business – Steve was never satisfied, and constantly strove to be the force of disruptive change that would make the Steve of six months ago irrelevant.  Never clinging to past successes, he maintained intense urgency around continuous reinvention.

6) Challenge Conventional Wisdom – When there were norms, he lived to shatter them.  Nearly every step of his success can be traced to inspired thinking that stuck his finger in the eye of the complacent incumbents.

7) Simplify – ‘Nuff said.

8) Ignore the Naysayers – If he listened to the “sound advice” of others, we’d never even know his name.  He never let the fear of others interfere with his own trajectory.

9) Persist – While today he sits victorious, there were many times he nearly lost it all.  There were dark days at Apple, Pixar, and even in his personal life.  Where others throw in the towel, Steve stared into the abyss and never accepted defeat.

10) Never Pigeonhole – Steve wasn’t a “computer executive.”  He was a visionary change agent and could not be constrained. He realized his calling was far beyond any categorical label.

11) Push Beyond What You Think is Possible – When Steve heard “that can’t be done”, it only emboldened his resolve.  He constantly drove himself and others to reach new heights.

Whether you’re building a tech startup, raising three kids or running a soup kitchen, these indelible philosophies serve as a roadmap to success.  While you may organize your thoughts on your MacBook, communicate with your team on your iPhone, and later jam some tunes on your iPod, the impact of Steve Jobs is far greater than the devices he’s provided.  Rather, he’s given us a model to reach our full potential.

Steve famously said he wanted to “put a ding in the universe.”  You have done that, my friend, and so much more.  The impact you’ve made is immeasurable, and has inspired a generation to “think different.”  Thank you for taking the path less traveled, for conquering the never-been-done, and for leading with purpose.  Thank you for changing the world.

*     *     *

Josh Linkner is the New York Times bestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity, named one of the top ten business books of 2011. He is the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm helping to rebuild urban areas through technology and entrepreneurship. Josh is the Founder, Chairman and former CEO of ePrize, the largest interactive promotion agency in the world providing digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands. Prior to ePrize, Josh was the founder and CEO of three other successful technology companies.  Josh’s writings are published frequently by Fast Company and Forbes and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, and on CNBC. Josh is also a professional-level jazz guitarist performing regularly in jazz clubs throughout the United States.

Most importantly, Josh in on a mission to make the world more creative.

For more information on creativity, please visit his website by clicking here. “In addition to my blog, you’ll find free videos, quizzes, articles, eBooks and more to help fuel your creative fire! “

 

 

Pixar’s “Daily” – Yes, You Do Accomplish What You Meet About (Reinforcing one of the “takeaways” from Josh Linkner’s Disciplined Dreaming)

This morning, I presented my synopsis of Disciplined Dreaming:  A Proven Guide to Drive Breakthrough Creativity by Josh Linkner, at the July First Friday Book Synopsis in Dallas.  It is hard to come up with the most important portion of the book.  It could be this one:

Businesses have systems and processes for everything, from answering the phone to taking out the trash.  Remarkably, most companies have no such system for the one thing that matters most:  developing and growing creative capacity. 
Companies that have “innovation processes” often stifle the creativity of their organization by making those processes too rule driven, formal, and restrictive.  In contrast, Disciplined Dreaming is an open system that focuses on the creative mind-set and philosophy along with specific techniques, rather than a rigid code of rules. 

Since we are falling behind on the creativity front in the United States,  (as we all know and acknowledge), getting some creativity discovery systems in place strikes me as a genuine high priority – maybe the highest.

As I read the book, I cam away with three takeaways the I considered especially important:

Takeaway #1 — spend a lot of time – a lot of time!!! – in creativity exercises  (ask questions; ask more questions; look around, list everything that you see; then, look some more, look much deeper than before…

Takeaway # 2 — “you accomplish what you meet about.” 

No meetings = no success.  Conducting/leading the right meetings, really! held regularly, over the long haul, makes success possible.

I am so fully convinced that this is ground zero in business success.  Here’s a paragraph about Pixar’s habit of a regular “Daily”:

Another practical tool Pixar uses is called the Daily; each day, teams hold review and feedback sessions on works in progress (unlike other studios, where people work alone or in silos and share work as a final product).  The daily fosters collaborative creativity and allows many people to offer ideas and insight as the creative work is being developed.  Head director John Lasseter credits the Daily with helping the studio develop better work in a more streamlined manner.  Even the Pixar building contributes to creative collaboration, its central atrium fostering random encounters between staff.

Takeaway #3 – beware of secrets.  Open communication fosters communication, and such communication fosters creativity breakthroughs…

If you have not yet read Disciplined Dreaming, it really is worth your time.  But, more importantly, ask yourself this question:  do you have a system in place to cultivate creativity?

————–

My synopsis of Disciplined Dreaming, with audio + handout, will be available in just a few days at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

And check out the Bob Morris interview of Josh Linkner on our blog here.

Peter Sims: An interview by Bob Morris

Peter Sims (Photo: Mona T. Brooks)

Peter Sims is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur.  He is the author of is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, from Simon & Schuster: Free Press.  Previously, he was the co-author with Bill George of True North,  the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-selling book, and he worked in venture capital with Summit Partners, a leading investment company, including as part of the team that established the firm’s London Office.

His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Tech Crunch, and Fortune and he’s a contributor to the Reuters, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review blogs.  He received an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School where he and several classmates established a popular course on leadership and has had a long collaboration with faculty at Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school).  He frequently speaks or advises at corporations, associations, and universities, including Google, Eli Lilly, Cisco, ConAgra, Pixar, and Stanford University.

He lives in San Francisco and his great-great-great grandfather, Jacob Gundlach, founded Gundlach Bundschu (GunBun) in Sonoma, California’s oldest family-owned winery, which is run today by his cousins who, unlike Peter, know a lot about wine.

*     *     *

Morris: Before discussing any if your books, a few general questions. First, when and why did you begin your association with Stanford’s Institute of Design (the d.school)?

Sims:  I was introduced to George Kembel, the cofounder and Executive Director of the d.school in 2002.  George became my design thinking teacher and mentor, while I shared about my experiences as an entrepreneur, investor, and student of leadership and entrepreneurship with George and his d.school colleagues.  Understanding design methods literally changed the way I think; all of a sudden, I was immensely more creative, and the key insight I had was that those methods overlapped with the way entrepreneurs worked in the unknown.  That became the basis for Little Bets.

Morris: What business lessons have you since learned from that association that have direct relevance to successful change initiatives in almost any organization, whatever its size and nature may be? For example, is it possible to design initiatives that will avoid or overcome cultural resistance?

Sims: There are a few principles from design that will influence the business world for years to come.  The first is the ability to do rapid, low-cost prototyping at the early stages of developing ideas.  We never learned that in business school, yet planning in PowerPoint and Excel is often a terrible waste of time when the answers exist outside the office, in the unarticulated needs of potential users of that idea.  That’s where ethnographic observation and need-finding techniques from design, the kind used by anthropologists, play an important role.  People in business are surprisingly bad at truly understanding their customers’ needs.  Market research doesn’t work for identifying unarticulated needs; just ask Steve Jobs who often says, “People don’t know what they want if they haven’t seen it.”

Morris: Thomas Edison once observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Here’s my question: Even after having designed the best strategy, what should leaders do if there is no buy-in?

Sims: I’ve experienced this; it happens all the time.  If there is no buy-in, leaders should wonder if they are hallucinating.  That’s one reason I’m very happy to see the rise of a number of schools of thought featured in Little Bets, such as design, lean startups, and counterinsurgency that advocate failing quickly to learn fast, in order to test assumptions and build on gains that work.  We’re living in an era that rewards bottom up innovation, yet top-down thinking is still the dominant management norm, an outgrowth of industrial management.  The world is far too uncertain for top-down management – just ask Generals in the Army as they’ve learned in the Middle East, where they don’t know the problems they’ll encounter each day.  They have to be able to rapidly adapt.

Morris: In your opinion, are investment opportunities for venture capital firms better, worse, or about the same today as they were when you were associated with Summit Partners? Please explain.

Sims: The market is far more competitive and saturated with capital today than it was several years ago.  As the investment hold periods get longer, and the return profiles fall,  venture capital as an industry is going through a recalibration, where name brand firms will make it, while a lot of dumb money will go away.  In addition, the social media valuations we see today, such as Linked In at 30+ times revenue, or Facebook valued the way it is indicates a bubble.  The only question I cannot answer is how long that bubble will last.

Morris: Now please shift your attention to True North, a book you co-authored with Bill George. For those who have not as yet read it, what is  “true north” and what is its significance?

Sims: Your True North represents your most deeply held values and aspirations.

Morris: What are the defining characteristics of “authentic leadership”?

Sims: Bill George defined authentic leadership along five dimensions in his book Authentic Leadership, most importantly leading from an ethical set of values, and a sense of purpose.

Morris: Throughout history, who do you think offer the best examples of an “authentic” leader? Please explain.

Sims: Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Jane Adams, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.  Oprah and Pixar’s Ed Catmull is a great modern day example, as are the leaders Jim Collins profiles as Level 5 Leaders in Good to Great.

Morris: Were Hitler and Stalin authentic leaders? Please explain.

Sims: No, because they weren’t ethical.

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Peter Sims cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

http://petersims.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/petersims

Tom Davenport explains the five ways Pixar executives make better decisions

Tom Davenport

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tom Davenport for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

I’m writing a new book with Larry Prusak and Brook Manville. If we had to name it today, we’d call it Judgment Days: How Great Organizations Make Great Decisions. It’s about how organizations — rather than individuals — build their capacity for good judgment and decision making. We’re going to try to show how individual decisions, made on particular “judgment days,” were shaped and succeeded by activities to improve organizational judgment. We hope to describe a variety of organizations — from companies to schools to hospitals to foundations — that make consistently great decisions over time. In order to surface some of the ideas and get feedback from readers, I’m going to start blogging about the book and plan to get Larry and Brook involved in that activity.

We think that organizations with good judgment have a number of typical attributes. One is that they involve a number of different people in making important decisions. Their senior executives keep in mind that they don’t have a monopoly on knowledge and judgment and therefore involve multiple people in decision processes.

Let me give you an example. Pixar (btw, I really enjoyed Toy Story 3) has a phenomenal track record for making great animated movies. (Ed Catmull, the studio’s president and co-founder, recently wrote an article for HBR called, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.” Click here.) We don’t have access — at least yet — to details of the particular decisions made at Pixar, though some must have been difficult: for instance, the decision to make the movie Up about a 78-year old man who loses his wife and rides his balloon-floated house to South America.

How did Pixar make that and other good decisions? There seem to be several factors going on:

Its managers give its directors a lot of autonomy. The studio prides itself on being “director led” and gives them a high degree of autonomy. “Managers like to be in control,” but Pixar fights it, according to an interview with Catmull at an event The Economist put on in March. [Click here.]

Even though directors have autonomy, they get feedback from others. “Dailies,” or movies in progress, are shown for feedback to the entire animation crew. In The Economist interview, Catmull also describes a more extensive periodic peer review process:
“We have a structure so they get their feedback from their peers…. Every two or three months they present the film to the other filmmakers…and they will go through, and they will tear the film apart. Directors aren’t forced to respond to the feedback, but they generally do — and the films are generally better for it.”

Pixar uses a process for “postmortems” on the major aspects of movies after they’re completed. Ed Catmull described it as “like taking cod liver oil,” but the company insists on it anyway. During the postmortems, the team involved in the film is asked to come up with five things they’d do again and five things they wouldn’t do again. Postmortems not only surface the information but also help to prevent the problems from festering among team members. Catmull comments that because people are starting to game that postmortem process, Pixar is thinking of alternative approaches.

Pixar admits mistakes in other ways. Sometimes, when a movie project isn’t going well, Pixar will “restart” it. Toy Story 2, for example, wasn’t going well and had to be restarted. Catmull points to that restart as a catalyst for the articulation of several key values at the company.

Pixar has an extensive education program at Pixar University, with more than 110 different courses. That’s got to improve organizational judgment. And even there, employees are encouraged to make and admit mistakes. Randy Nelson, the director of Pixar University, says, in the book Mavericks at Work: “It’s the heart of our model…giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together.”

*     *     *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. Over many years he’s authored or co-authored nine books for Harvard Business Press, most recently Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (2007) and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results (2010). His byline has also appeared for publications such as Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Financial Times, Information Week, CIO, and many others. For more from Tom, visit his website [click here].

Linda Hill on “leading from behind”

Here is an excerpt from article written by Linda Hill for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

(Editor’s note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June 2010, hosted by HBS’s Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook.)

For now and into coming decade or so, the most effective leaders will lead from behind, not from the front — a phrase I’ve borrowed from none other than Nelson Mandela. In his autobiography, Mandela equated a great leader with a shepherd: “He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

It’s a concept whose time has come, given several realities:

The psychological contract between companies and employees is changing. Among other things, people are looking for more meaning and purpose in their work lives. They want and increasingly expect to be valued for who they are and to be able to contribute to something larger than themselves. People expect to have the opportunity to co-author their organization’s purpose. They want to be associated with organizations that serve as positive forces in the world.

Innovation — not simply incremental but continual breakthrough innovation — will be a key driver of competitiveness. Society’s notion of the brilliant innovator, the solitary genius with a sudden flash of creative insights is hard to shake. But, after all, an iPod or a Pixar movie is not the product of a single person’s vision or labors. Most innovation is the result of collaborative work involving a diverse group and a collective process of iteration and discovery. Those in positions of authority have been taught to think that it’s their job to come up with the big idea — but sustained innovation comes when everyone has an opportunity to demonstrate a “slice of genius” (an idea that has evolved from my research with Greg Brandeau, the CTO of the Walt Disney Studios, and my research associate Emily Stecker). Breakthroughs come when seemingly ordinary people make extraordinary contributions.

Leaders can encourage breakthrough ideas not by cultivating followers who can execute but building communities that can innovate. Of course, leaders do need to act as direction-setters and vision-makers, and we need to prepare them for those roles. But we often emphasize these skills at the expense of others that are growing in importance. If you’re looking for innovation, it doesn’t make much sense to say that the leader’s job is to set the course and mobilize people to follow them there. If you want your team to produce something truly original, you don’t know where you’re going, almost by definition. The traditional leadership model just doesn’t work.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Dunham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative.