Management, Leadership, Innovation And More, With Linda Hill

Most people assume leadership and management are the same thing. Although both roles mean getting top positions, they require vastly different mindsets and perspectives. Joining J.R. Lowry in this conversation is Linda Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor at the Harvard Business School. Together, they discuss how leaders should handle their transition to managerial positions smoothly, as well as how to handle the many challenges that come with it. Linda also explains how leaders should cultivate innovation within their teams and how she sees emerging technologies could shape the future of work.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/linda-hill/

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Management, Leadership, Innovation And More, With Linda Hill

Wallace Brett Donham Professor At Harvard Business School

My guest is Linda Hill, who is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. Linda is the author or co-author of Collective Genius, Being the Boss, and Becoming a Manager. She’s got a new book coming out next year that we’ll talk about.

She is also a co-founder of Paradox Strategies and of Innovation Force, a SaaS company using AI and machine learning to accelerate the process of innovation. In our discussion, we’re going to be covering Linda’s motivations for entering academia, her early research on the transition into management, some of her more recent work on Collective Genius and innovation, as well as a little bit about what she’s doing outside of her research and her thoughts on the future.

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Linda, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show.

It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

We’re going to start by covering your career inspiration, and how you got into academia. I know you got your bachelor’s at Bryn Mawr and your master’s and your PhD at Chicago. You were studying psychology and behavioral sciences. What led you to leadership and management studies?

To be perfectly honest, I actually came to Harvard Business School to do a postdoc because I was getting married to a man who was finishing up medical school here. I didn’t think I would stay.

Here you are.

A Deeper Understanding Of Organizations

Here I am. What ended up happening is I found that I was fascinated by the work. I really loved the fact that at Harvard Business School, you could do theory and practice because I always loved that connection. My degree in behavioral science is not so much focused on psychology, but more broadly on social sciences. When I came here and began to do the postdoc with John Cotter, I really wanted to hone my skills in being an ethnographer because I’d always been fascinated by anthropology. Now I really consider myself an organizational anthropologist or ethnographer.

What did you envision yourself doing when you were getting your PhD? Did you think you would be teaching or did you have different plans?

I did think I was going to be teaching but I was becoming concerned. I have to tell you I’m an army brat. I thought I was a hospital administrator in the military. Frankly, I hadn’t really been exposed to business. What happened when I was in Chicago is I realized I was interested in organizations more than education. The only reason I really went into education initially or was going to get my degree there was because those are the only organizations I knew and I’ve been successful in them. Obviously, I love education.

My imagination wasn’t so big because I hadn’t been exposed to what business could be about. Fortunately for me, John Cotter, I guess saw something in me and thought I might really enjoy business. What I really loved initially was it was organizational, it was theory and practice but then I began to understand that business plays such an important role in economic development. I think what really drives me is I’m really interested in making sure that all people, even marginalized people can improve their lives and livelihoods. Business is a perfect vehicle for doing that.

When you wrote Becoming a Manager back in the early 1990s, it was based on research that you’ve done of new sales managers and financial services and tech. How did you find your way from being a postdoc working with John Cotter into studying salespeople and their transition into management?

To be perfectly honest I studied many more people than salespeople but I decided to focus on sales specifically because I really wanted to focus on the process of learning. I didn’t want to have to explain so much about the difference between being in tech or wherever you were in the organization. Much to my surprise, there was a lot of concern about this because many of my colleagues said, “People are not going to identify with this book, Linda if they’re not sales managers.”

I have to tell you the first week the book came out, I got three phone calls. One from some priests in Brooklyn who said, “We picked up your book and we discovered we’re managers.” A second from a man who was a head coach in a hockey team. The third was from a man who was a hedge fund manager that we all know, can’t say a thing. I began to think, “It is generalizable.” The process people go through as they learn to become a manager is the same in many ways. It doesn’t matter.

I think still today that I was mentioning, I was actually in another country last week, I was in Geneva at the United Nations and someone said to me, “If I hadn’t read your book, I wouldn’t have survived.” Now I must tell you that I didn’t even think anybody would read the book when you write your first book. When you write your 2nd or 3rd, you worry about that too. If I can tell you why I wrote it, I had taken some business courses at Chicago because I just did. They were part of understanding organizations but what ended up happening when I came and I had to teach people how to manage and lead, I thought, “Linda, you don’t know what that’s about. You’ve never done it yourself.”

What I ended up doing is going to the library and discovering that there was not much research on how people learn to lead. I thought, “I’ll do a little research on that and I’ll learn what I need to know so that I can actually help these MBAs that I’m supposed to be helping because I understand what that process is. The last thing I’d say about that is that I actually studied learning theory, both at Bryn Mawr and when I did my master’s degree. I took what I already knew but wanted to look at leaders and arrange what goes on here and as people make this transition and learned how complicated it was for people.

It is complicated and one of the things that are really stuck with me, I read the book probably about two years ago after I first moved into management, more just out of interest in how people are writing about the process of becoming a new manager. You describe it early in the book as one of the biggest transitions that someone could go through in their career and something that changes them, not just enroll, but as people as well. Why is it that the transition to management is so foundational?

It’s interesting. For some people, they never make the transition. They never do become very good managers or leaders because it does require a different mindset. You have to learn different ways of getting satisfaction from work. If you never really make it what you do, you don’t really make the transition. You don’t really change your identity and think, “I’m working with or through others as opposed to I’m the individual contributor.” If you don’t learn to get comfortable with all that interdependence, because that’s one of the things that shocks people, I thought I would feel freer.

In fact, I feel more dependent on other people to be successful. If you don’t learn how to cope with all of that, it only becomes worse as you become more senior. Even when you become a CEO, CEOs are just shocked to discover in some ways, now I still have to exercise influence when I don’t have formal authority because I have this board and they’re the most complicated group of people I’ve ever had to work with. Nonetheless, stakeholders outside.

I think if you don’t make it in those beginning stages when it’s really a baby step even though it’s so fundamental if your identity doesn’t make that shift, again, every time you make a transition, you still go back and have to learn some of these lessons. It really shows up in very senior people who never really did it. The way it shows up is you can have very senior people, the more talented they are, the more motivated they are, who fundamentally become the star producer, the star individual contributor for their group.

They’re either push or pull. That group, they never actually step back and learn to lead. They never think about what’s my impact on the culture and capabilities of this group as a group because that’s what leadership is about. I think it’s fundamental because if you don’t make it early on, it sticks with you that you never made it and you might make it later because you’ll finally not be able to get your arms around whatever it is and you’ll begin to make that shift. I think that’s one thing. The other thing is we develop habits and preferences pretty early on about how we like to lead and manage. We all know how hard it is to break a habit once that habit has been established and has worked for you.

What you said a minute ago about people being super-doers, essentially. They’re still like the star producer in the star individual contributor, even when they’re in a role of management. You can maybe get away with that as a 1st or 2nd line manager but I have to believe it gets a lot harder after that. When you’re managing 50 or 100 or thousand people, you can’t do everybody’s jobs for them and you have to figure out how to lead through influence and inspiration and empowerment. At some point, I guess that lack of transition has to break down for people who are aspiring to go higher into an organization.

It does have to in the way that you’re describing, except and certainly in professional service firms. Actually, we see many times they’re not so well led or managed because in fact, the people who have the big roles haven’t made the shift. I agree with you that the pressure for you to do that grows because fundamentally you outgrow yourself. The job outgrows you and what you can do on your own. The more talented you are, the longer it can take for you to do that. When you do it, it’s so much more costly to the organization because then it’s a leap as opposed to a reasonable step.

You watch these managers that were the basis of your research for something like a year, right?

Yes, interestingly enough, the research I do now is very longitudinal. I love to watch leaders. I’ve been studying one senior executive since he was at Fiat, at Volkswagen, at Audi, Seat, and now he’s at Renault. I actually like to look at people over time. Particularly because I now study culture and how you build culture, you very rarely change the culture of a large organization in less than five years. Unless I stick around, which is why there’s such and I think a distance between my books in some ways, I’m not really going to be able to evaluate their impact.

The more recent books, you mean?

The more recent books. That book, it was a year. Although I must say, one of those organizations I ended up working with for quite some time. I didn’t continue to systematically look at the same question, but I did have other reasons to do work with some of those new managers as they became, as frankly, as some of them got promoted to fairly senior positions.

It’s been 30-odd years since you wrote the book and the research was even a little bit older than that. Before we started recording, you were talking about how people still read the book, buy it, read it, and find relevant learnings in it. How is it so timeless for people?

I must confess, I make an effort to write books that are timeless and as opposed to timely. I try to look at fundamental issues. I think that one, as I said, is it turns out people haven’t studied a whole lot about how people learn to lead and the process and what I describe in there about how you learn the myths and the realities of what leadership is going to be about. I guess we called it management then, and just to be clear, and I know that distinction is an important one when you’re talking about certain things.

I would say that there are these fundamental challenges that people face. Nowadays, when you’re an individual contributor, you still are very dependent on lots of other people but I don’t think that the emotional part of it. What people often say to me when they read Being the Boss is no one really writes about the emotional challenge. They write about the tasks. They write less about how it feels.

The person who said, “You have a baby and you want to do everything right with this baby and you have no idea how to raise a child.” This is one of the comparisons that people make. I think it’s the emotional side of it that people really appreciate. In fact, when I wrote the book, a number of my colleagues were very upset because they wanted me to compare those who made it versus those who didn’t.

What I found was even the ones who made it found it pretty painful. On the one hand, I think that message is true and it’s still true today. In fact, it’s even harder to make the transition today because the job you get is harder. I think that’s why it’s ended up being pretty timeless, but it still shocks me how little research has been done on looking at the experience of people learning to lead. It’s not an area. There are more books about what leadership is or management is, but not about how you learn it as it turns out.

How it feels, right?

Right.

You’ve done a couple of additions since then. What do you aim to update in the two additions you’ve put out since then?

One was I had the privilege of being asked to lead a team to create our required course on leadership for the MBA program. We didn’t have one and a vote was made that we should have one. I got to lead that effort, which again was a precious opportunity with my colleagues who are quite esteemed and knew a lot more about it. It’s right when I first got tenure, I really began to write down my ideas and think through what it is that I thought. Obviously, I asked everybody else as well.

How To Become A Manager

You needed to be doing with MBAs when they were at the school because one of the things I learned from that book and I remember going to the dean at the time Dean MacArthur and saying, “They don’t really learn to lead while they’re in school. They just don’t they learn it on the job.” When I actually found myself in this leadership role to lead my colleagues many of whom were tenured etc., and more senior than me, I really went back to thinking about what is the experience that people have and how can we prepare them to actually be able to make the transition.

This was an MBA course. Prepare them to develop the mindset, the identity, and some of those fundamental skills required as they move through the course of their careers have become more senior. As I was working all of that out and having conversations, I began to write out. As you know, the myths versus the realities didn’t really hit me until I started talking to lots of new managers and working on the course. That’s why I did that. We ended up writing. In fact, I did write a textbook of sorts, but I didn’t really want to write one.

What I agreed to was that I would write another edition of Becoming a Manager, but eventually, the next edition, because they continued to ask me, became Being the Boss. Being the Boss, I’m not remembering what year it was published, in my mind was the result of thinking about how people learn to lead and the realities of how these roles were becoming more complicated over time. Plus, what I was beginning to see when I looked at leading innovation. We moved to a whole different framing of leadership as three imperatives. I felt that that deserved its own book.

It wasn’t another edition. There is innovation research and also some of the other work I was doing on how people learn to lead about mentorship, etc., that is the basis of Being the Boss, but I actually shifted to that instead of doing another edition of Becoming a Manager. It’s a much broader book, Being the Boss. Interestingly enough, again, I was partly writing it for people who are relatively junior in their careers in some ways, but just like Becoming a Manager, very senior people read and read both books.

Being the Boss is read by much more senior people than I thought. Even CEOs, that’s not who I had in my head because they never really thought of leadership in the way that is described in Being the Boss. Being the Boss, we talk about leadership as being three imperatives. The first imperative is managing yourself and recognizing that leadership is always about using yourself as an instrument to get things done. You’re trying to match your intent and your impact and that leadership is always about an emotional connection.

It’s about how people experience you and how they experience themselves when they are with you. The second imperative is managing your network. That is about managing all the individuals and groups over whom you have no formal authority, but who you’re deeply dependent on to get your job done. Those people are inside and outside the organization. The final imperative, the third one is managing your team. Managing your team is about managing those people over whom you do have formal authority.

We wrote it in that order because if I were to ask you what is leadership, everybody looks down. They obviously will say the people who report to me. They now, thanks to EQ, look inside managing yourself. There’s more of that now that wasn’t there when I first started the business school so much. The part about managing your network, many people don’t like that part. They don’t see it as leadership. They see it as the politics of organizational life, the dysfunction of organizational life.

The Three Imperatives

When you look particularly at innovation and actually execution in general, nowadays that horizontal work is what really makes the difference and whether or not an organization is going to be able to compete, whether it’s going to be agile, what’s going to be innovative, and that was showing up in my innovation work that I was doing at that time. The other thing that the reason I wanted to write about it is because as it turns out when you read the research on ethics or ethical behavior when people aren’t proud of how they behaved, it’s because they didn’t know how to exercise power and influence and give voice to their values.

That’s because they didn’t know how to manage up. They always say, “I felt powerless.” Powerlessness is as corrupting as power is. When I was at that point in my career, thinking about, I do have a statement I’d like to make and Kent is someone who I was doing a lot of work with on a number of things. Let’s reconceive leadership because we can’t keep it simply tied to vision because what we’re beginning to see in our innovation work is that leading innovation is not about vision, it’s about something else.

I deeply respect John Cotter and Warren Bennis who we’re both active mentors of mine. They’re right, leading change is vision, communicating, and inspiring people to fulfill it. Again, I was trying to solve a couple of problems. One, how do I propose a way of thinking about leadership? This is for also the leadership course, the required course of leadership here at the business school. How do I reconceive it so that leading innovation fits because it’s not vision? How do I take it and really help people understand that a lot of leadership these days is about the network? We reconceived it. That meant, I told HBP, the Harvard Business Publishing, I don’t want to do another edition.

I really want to put out a book. They didn’t really want me to call it Being the Boss because as they said, “People don’t like that word.” I said, “Everybody knows what a boss is.” Everybody knows, and the reason I want to call it Being the Boss and there was again some pushback is because when you become the boss when you do have formal authority, you have not only duties, rights and privileges, you have duties and obligations. This goes to my concern about ethical dilemmas, etc. I really wanted people to know, “You may play like you’re not the boss, but they all know you’re the boss.” Let’s call a spade a spade.

How did that then lead to Collective Genius?

I was doing those two books at the same time. As I said, Being the Boss happened partly because as I was collecting the data on leading innovation and I saw, “It’s not about vision. How am I going to talk about this?” A lot of that is horizontal. Again, organizations are able to innovate. That meant that both books were late in a way because I stopped and wrote Being the Boss and I needed to do that because the course needed that. Also, that’s where my head was but then I could go deep in Collective Genius. I still had a lot more data to collect there because as I mentioned, unless you stay for a few years, you really can’t understand what’s happening in an organization.

What were some of the key themes that came out in the Collective Genius book?

First off, I was shocked. Partly the Collective Genius book is mostly, it was written when the digital companies were just coming, the Googles, the Ebays, etc. I studied a number of leaders in those organizations. In fact, in part in Pixar, this was when we had this whole tech boom. Most of the companies in there, not all of them are companies that were innovating, that everybody saw as innovative. When I began to study what the leaders were doing in those companies, one of them said to me, “I stopped reading leadership books because, on page two, it says I’m supposed to have a vision. By definition, Linda, when you’re doing breakthrough innovation, you have no vision. You don’t have an answer.”

That’s not what I do. Of course, then everyone had told me this was one of the greatest leaders of innovation ever. After 3 or 4 of them said this to me, I was like, “There’s a problem.” It wasn’t that they weren’t visionary because they were all visionary, but they understood that leading change is about, I have a vision, follow me to the future. Leading innovation, you don’t have the vision really. You only know the why, the purpose. The problem you’re trying to solve or the opportunity you’re trying to address.

What leading innovation is about is how do I create an environment in which people are willing and able to co-create the future with me, not follow me to the future. Those are two very different orientations about what you’re doing. The book I’m writing now, which is called Genius at Scale, is really about how do you transform. Most of the organizations we’re looking at are iconic organizations, big organizations, often in regulated businesses, where in fact there’s a transformation process that needs to happen to get that organization to be more innovative and to do it at scale.

In this next book, actually, you see a lot more leaders who are transforming their organizations to be able to operate like Pixar in Collective Genius, if you will. Now, of course, the Googles of the world, all of those organizations, to include Pixar, they’re now middle-aged companies and struggling with some of the same dilemmas that we know from lots of research that organizations struggle with once they get larger and a little older.

How have you ever looked at the track record of people who leave Google and Amazon and LinkedIn and the other companies that have been the big tech darlings, Meta, and Facebook? How do they do when they move into other industries?

I have not studied that so I couldn’t really tell you. I have followed certain individuals over the course of their careers, like I mentioned to you, Luca from when he did the turnaround of the Fiat 500 to what he’s doing now in Renault as the CEO and working a lot in electric vehicles, etc., lots of different things he’s working on. I have followed individuals. In fact, I followed one of the one person who ends up in both books is the CEO of HCL Technologies and Collective Genius, who was able to reinvigorate that company.

They had started the industry, through the tech industry, and then they lost their way. He was brought, at the time was considered a very young CEO in India to turn it around. He’s the last chapter of the book I’m writing right now about he’s gone into education reform because one of the problems he identified when he was at HCL was, it’s our education system in India. He said, “You’re taught the following way. The teacher dictates you repeat. It’s not critical thinking.” Consequently, when you become a manager, you think that your job is to tell people what to do and to make sure they don’t deviate and good employees think they shouldn’t deviate.

As he looks at what it takes to be competitive today and what you need from your managers and your employees, that doesn’t work, that mindset about it. Now he ended up with what he did, and we described that in Collector Genius having 25 year-olds come up with $15 million ideas for customers because he changed the paradigm. The last chapter of our book is he’s had an impact on 20 million children.

He’s working on education reform in primary schools and villages. He’s having unbelievable success with that in places where there’s no electricity or whatever and it grows out of what he was worried about actually in Collective Genius. He’s a person I’ve continued to follow. In fact, the other co-author of the new book Genius and Scale is a man who was in the last chapter of Collective Genius.

He was a relatively junior person at IBM. I wanted to name him because we got along so well in the book and they said, “You can’t put too many names in a book.” Now I was teasing my editor. He’s not going to be on the cover because he ended up becoming the head of managing strategic partnerships, i.e. the biggest customers for Salesforce and then for Microsoft. Again, I’ve watched him grow over the course of his career. We stayed in touch and he’s now the co-author of Genius of Scale.

Go back to what you were saying a few minutes ago about creating the environment for innovation to flourish. What are some of the things that are important for leaders to do?

What we found in that research was that as I said, these leaders think about how do I create an environment or set the stage for others to co-create with me. We’ve always known that innovation is fundamentally about the collaboration of individuals with different perspectives, different expertise, etc. You very rarely get innovation without diversity of thought and conflict. That’s one thing. The second thing we’ve always known is that innovation is really the result usually of discovery-driven learning. You can’t plan your way.

You plan as much as you can, but then you’re going to have to act your way to that innovation. We see many companies adopt methods like Agile or design thinking or lean startup, something where you’re experimenting and learning in an iterative way. The third capability that we know makes a difference is your capacity to make decisions in a way that you use the diversity of thought. You use what you learn from these experiments. We call that creative resolution. We say that there are three muscles that you need to build in your organization. If you want to be able to innovate time and again.

That’s what we mean by an exceptional your innovation, not just doing it once, but doing it time and again. These three muscles of creative abrasion is about collaboration, creative agility and then create a resolution. Those three muscles are the muscles you want to build. Once you’ve built them in your team or your organization, your people should be able. There is a culture that makes people be willing. The culture is why do I want to do this. You don’t want to do it unless you feel you’re part of a community and you have some sense of belonging and you trust the people because there’s always risk entailed when you innovate.

The culture we did find, and I’m very excited to see that purpose is being written about so much these days, but when we were collecting the data in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, people were like, “Why are you writing so much about purpose?” I said, “Purpose matters.” People have to be willing to take the risks, the career risks, and the organizational risks required to do breakthrough innovation. Unless they feel this sense of community is what we called it, that is founded on some purpose, some why that is meaningful to them, they’re not going to do it. Purpose matters.

Then there were four values that we found mattered. There were what we refer to as rules of engagement about how we’re going to interact and think together. What you want to work on are those. The four values, every organization has its own values. As I think from looking at the work, we tend to do cross. I also study globalization. The leaders are from many parts of the world, particularly in the book we’re doing right now. What you see in those organizations is that the leaders really focus on making sure there is that sense of purpose, making sure that these four values, they won’t surprise you.

One is bold ambition. Don’t just think about what we should be doing for our customers, but think about what we could be doing. The other is learning. Learning as a value in an organization is really hard because learning looks like or feels like it goes against performance, and most organizations are there. The other two values are collaboration. We called the fourth one responsibility, which is basically a sense of accountability. There are these four values that need to be there. There are these I won’t walk.

I don’t know if you want me to walk you through all the rules of engagement, but the one thing I will say about the rules of engagement at first we thought about the rules of engagement about how we’re supposed to interact with each other in these organizations. They’re important but then we began to see that there were rules of engagement about how we’re supposed to problem-solve together. Those actually, I don’t think leaders pay as much attention to sometimes. For instance, one of them is that you always have to provide evidence for whatever your point of view is that you’re bringing up.

You can’t just say I believe X. You have to tell people what your evidence is. Now this becomes very important with generative AI and all the use of data because we’re now doing work on digital. It turns out that if you don’t tell people what your evidence is when they ask you questions, it feels like a personal attack. If you tell me what your evidence is and one of the other norms we see in these organizations are rules of engagement, you can question anybody and everybody. You can say, “I know that you have deep experience and expertise in this situation because you said that your experience tells you this is the right answer.

How do we know that the situation we’re in now is really like the one where you developed your expertise?” You still have to say it politely, because that’s called contextual intelligence. It may work in that context, but is this a different or is this the same? In these organizations, they have a rule. You have to provide your evidence to anybody who can ask you a question. The third one is you have to think holistically. You may agree that yes, that’s the right way to go but you can still say to people, “That may work for your part of the organization, but it’s not going to work for my part for thinking holistically.

Can we continue to problem solve and helped me figure out how it’s going to work in my part of the organization.” We really saw, and it turns out this piece of the puzzle is so important with digital which has been really fascinating because one of the things we’re seeing there, and I want to stay where you want to stay, is that what people tell us is that just because you provide data for people, doesn’t mean they’re going to use it. I think part of it is unless you have the right norms in place about how we’re supposed to problem solve together, I think it’s really hard for people to embrace whatever data you’ve provided for them because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to ask.

I see that this is what the data seems to say, but I have some questions to ask about the data, like where did it came from, all this other stuff, which you really want people to do particularly now with generative AI. We’ve written an article when I’m working with, we were talking earlier, I have two executives who are working with on that project. We wrote an article about its not data-driven, it’s data-informed, because you actually do want people to use their judgment in figuring out the data do not necessarily provide the answer.

You don’t want them to ignore it but you actually, particularly with generative AI, etc. You really want them to dig into what’s the quality of the data. Even ask, just because we have the data, should we really use it? Is it responsible? There are other questions you want people to ask about data. It’s evidence-based is what we now say.

In the new book, Genius at Scale, you have an ABC framework that is the organizing construct for the book, right?

Yeah. What happened was I feel like I’m a contrarian, and maybe I am, but when we were writing Collective Genius, which was already too long, and I guess this new book, we’re trying to be encouraged to make it a little shorter, but I’m having trouble being an ethnographer. I think details matter or anthropologists. What happened was the ninth chapter of Collective Genius, we talk about something we call Collective Genius 2.0 because we were beginning to see that. What we began to see is that the innovation was not just happening inside one company.

Companies were having to partner with other companies to do their innovating and or create a whole ecosystem, an innovative ecosystem to do what they wanted to do. If you think about electric vehicles, an auto company can make electric vehicles, but unless there are ways to charge the car, unless there are batteries, unless there’s regulation that’s right, etc. You’re not going to sell so many of those cars. In the last chapter, chapter nine of Collective Genius, we talked about, how we see leaders not only having to do innovation across their enterprise but also across their ecosystems.

The ABCs of innovation are one, you have to, A is Collective Genius, but with the digital in it because these tools are now so pervasive. A is can you architect an environment, culture, and capabilities? In fact, people will be willing and able to innovate. B is about the fact that you’re going to have to bridge. If you want to do anything at scale and you want to do it with any speed, you probably can’t build all the capabilities inside that you need to do that. We see that leaders have to become bridgers.

They really have to learn how to go outside the boundaries of the organization to get access to the tools and talent the organization needs to innovate. They have to figure out how do we co-create with somebody outside. Take Microsoft, chat GPT. You need leaders who know how to bridge. That’s the B and that’s hard work. That’s not just about doing the contracting. It’s really about mutual trust and influence. You can come up with something new together with some party that’s very different from you in their priorities, constraints, and capabilities.

The third thing we see is where I started, this ecosystem deal, where it’s not just about individual partners, it’s actually where you need to elevate a whole ecosystem. Here, for instance, if you think about the man who ran the clinical trials at Pfizer in 266 days, it turns out we’d been studying him for about five years before COVID happened because he was doing this transformation. He was architecting. As we all know, Pfizer did not have the IP. They had to work with a German biotech company to do that fast. That’s the bridging piece of it.

They also had to work with regulators all around the world to figure out how to do rigorous science and make sure it was safe, but do it as quickly as possible so they all had to all the whole ecosystem had to step back and say, “How are we going to do this? That’s an ecosystem play. That’s not just a partnership because you needed many others.” They had to deal with their suppliers in a different way to get access to the materials.

What we see is someone like this executive who is running the clinical supply chain, he had to think about all those parties. Even if his own team did its part, it would not be able to innovate at the speed they had to innovate to scale the way they had to do. If they had not working with all their other colleagues at Pfizer but outside of Pfizer, built out the ecosystem necessary for that. We see more and more leaders, and even having to do this in pretty junior roles because scale and speed matter.

You and I both know that just generating great ideas, doesn’t mean they’re going to get commercialized or scaled. That book is talking about genius and scale has two notions to it. One is it’s not about just generating the ideas, it’s about scaling the ideas. To scale the ideas, you’re going to have to work with lots more people, and lots more organizations who have different priorities, constraints, and capabilities than you to get it done. That’s what that book is about.

Do you think these ecosystems that get created in situations like that, are they lasting or are they just marriages of convenience to get scale fast, and then the insourcing, reinsourcing starts back up?

I actually think what we’re seeing, the last section of the book is about how you sustain them. That’s the question. It’s really hard. What we’re really talking about is you have to build the social fabric to hold this loosely, we call it a movement. We talk when you’re architecting, you’re building a community. When you’re bridging, you’re building partnerships. When you’re doing these ecosystem plays, you’re actually building movements. They’re loosely coupled, but they are all wanting to move in some direction together. That is a big question.

Again, do you build the relationship? One of the things that organizations often are told, if you want to innovate, then create what is referred to as an ambidextrous organization. Have one part that’s focusing on the core and improving there, but another part that’s really exploring the future. Now, the thing that I didn’t know until I started doing research on this is that many of these efforts to create these special units. The big problem is they never get integrated back into, everybody says, “Yes, we came up with wonderful stuff in our innovation lab or our corporate accelerator, but it never gets integrated back into the core and scaled.”

We studied about ten of these arrangements and we’re writing about three of them that were particularly successful and have been sustained and exactly the question, and why is that? It’s because of the social relationships, a partnership was actually built. Now sometimes you don’t need all of that. It’s a group that you’re going to spend a little bit of time with and not do other things with. If I think about Microsoft, I don’t have any inside information, which is why I can say this to you. Chat GPT, if they’re going to build that product, chat GPT and all of their products, that is something that better be sustained.

You better build some social fabric because it’s going to have to be upgraded. That’s not a one-time deal. We see more of that. Actually, one of the reasons I asked Jason, who’s my co-author, and I want to come back to one other piece on that, to join us is because what he used to do at both Salesforce and Microsoft was helping their biggest clients, figure out how to use digital tools and data. Those are just enablers but how to use them in a way that they could begin to change their culture so that those tools and data would be used.

He often was involved in working with these accelerators and innovation labs and had a lot of insight into what makes them work and why they don’t. Often, again, I was just down at Georgia Tech with a group there called Engage of a number of chief innovation officers from a number of large companies and the integration question is the challenge. A lot of the academic writing is about what the senior executives need to do for those to work and not very much is about the person who actually leads the lab or whatever and that’s where we focus. I don’t try to find places where no research has been done.

It’s more like, “You tell me, we were giving this advice to executives or to managers or whatever. When I go to look, it turns out because the Academy is siloed, that we don’t go into the black box ourselves sometimes.” The people who do strategy and they do fabulous work and talk about ambidextrous organizations. They’re very macro. They’re either economists or macro sociologists. They don’t really think about what is the individual leader who has to lead that thing. What’s his or her or their job? The last one is the catalyst. I didn’t say what it meant, catalyzing.

The last one can become like a master card when they wanted to become more of a tech company in payments, they had to build out a whole new ecosystem of partners, startups, and others, because they were really shifting the business and it wasn’t each partnership. You need to think of getting each partnership right, but it was more stepping back and saying, “Who we want to be connected to so that we can actually do what we need to do.” As you may or may not know, their technology became the rails for both Apple Pay and Android Pay or Google Pay.

The Importance Of Contextual Intelligence

That’s pretty amazing to competitors because they were able to scale that capability. They had unbelievable bridgers and catalysts down in the organization who they had all the problems you have, but had the capabilities to actually work through those problems and understood working through the legal agreements is that can be grueling, to say the least, but that’s just the start of it. Often by the end of that, you don’t even want to look at those people. Nonetheless, co-create something new with them.

MasterCard, I think you described in one of the articles that you sent me, it’s a duopoly. For many years, it behaved like a duopoly, and trying to get a company like that to do more innovation, to be really cutting edge, was a massive cultural shift for them.

Actually what it started, if you recall, the then CEO said we’re going into financial inclusion. What I always, when I teach the case that we wrote about this. I’m assuming if you think about who was the head of MasterCard at that time, mostly ex-bankers, these people when he said we’re going to go into financial inclusion, individuals and small business, small medium-sized businesses that don’t have access to the formal markets.

They’re not credit-worthy. You have to imagine that his colleagues thought, “These are the people that we didn’t want in the bank. Now you’re telling me that’s where our growth is going to be?” It was about defining purpose and then having to figure out how they’re going to do this in a profitable way. It’s interesting that he’s now the head of the World Bank, but anyway, you can see that for him, that clearly was a passion. A deep-seated personal purpose passion, if you will.

He followed through on it, which is amazing. Mindful of time, would love to just get your thoughts on what do you see out there that really excites you about trends in leadership.

The last thing I didn’t say to you that I really do want to say is whenever I do research, I always have on my team the co-authors. As it turns out, the co-author of Collective Genius was a woman named Emily Truelove. I have another Emily who’s the co-author of this Genius in Scale. I always like to have someone in their 20s, really full partners. Emily this time is the second author of Genius in Scale. She’s in her 20s. Brilliant. We don’t see the world the same way at all. She actually was teasing me the other day. We do and we don’t.

About, “When are we going to do the TikTok version of Genius of Scale?” Like, “What?” Anyhow, I don’t know what she was teasing me about but just saying. We’re trying to write a book which is proving complicated that will really inspire both established leaders and emerging leaders because I really always want to think about what the future is. What’s exciting for both of us now is this ecosystem stuff. I think leaders are grappling with it and it’s becoming ever more important for doing business, but also, I mean, from her point of view, and also mine for solving climate and problems like that where you have to work across sectors.

I’m not talking about it in the straight ESG or whatever, but what we see is, and I know that there’s some fad and fashion and all of that, but as far as I’m concerned, climate change is true, is real. It will require leaders who understand how to work across ecosystems to address that or even our healthcare systems. We’ve been doing work on healthcare, the two of us, and healthcare is broken in the United States. It’s broken in most places in the world. One organization can’t fix that. You actually need leaders who can think about all the different players in that enough to get started as opposed to being overwhelmed and begin to fix that. She and I both have interests.

If we’re going to build thriving businesses and thriving communities, we do see helping leaders learn how to do this exercising influence when you don’t have formal authority, which most people hate. They don’t even like to take those jobs and organizations that are really good at that. It’s going to be a part of the answer. Already beneath the man from HCL, they have evidence that they have improved the primary education of 20 million children in India in a matter of years. He knows that unless you educate, there’s a huge population and that youth, they got to do something about it.

A.I. Teleportation And The Future Of Business

The other person we’re looking at is a woman who’s in agribusiness in Nigeria and how are we going to feed ourselves and how are we going to export as opposed to why are we importing food? Why aren’t we able to make our own food, and export food? She’s a businesswoman who’s in agribusiness and she knows that there’s this ecosystem there that’s not so supportive of actually doing business very effectively. I think that that’s what excites me, people who are our systems thinkers and saying, “We need to get to the root cause of what’s some of what’s not working.”

I think many business leaders are finding CEOs realize COVID taught us one thing, we are deeply interdependent around the world. We may have already forgotten that, but we are. I was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, I forget how many years ago now, and a talk was given to us about the fact that there was going to be a pandemic because of all the things that were happening, mobility of people, climate, etc. It was right on time. I have my notes. This idea is that we, and now fortunately we have new technologies and we have human ingenuity.

One of the organizations we’re looking at is young, they’re not so young now. They don’t like for me to call them young, but they’re young compared to me. I was on a panel in Japan with a man who was talked about the teleportation business. He was working at ANA. I thought, “Teleportation.” It’s actually teleportation of human consciousness, our five senses, it’s going to be at least 75 years before you can teleport a body. Seriously, I mean, what they produce, this is a startup, we have some big companies, we have some starts, but it’s out of ANA who’s going into the mobility business, not just the airline business, their avatar robots, wonderful, complicated story.

They were used during COVID. You could get one of their avatar robots, and they were in the hospital so people could say goodbye to their families, and members who were dying in the hospital they couldn’t visit, as well as they’re being used now. You can find them in the airports in Pan either in the back helping with maintenance or in the front helping with customer service. I am excited but to do that the number of technologies involved in the teleportation of the five senses. Imagine taking something like that on. They’re doing it.

That’s what excites me. People who are not afraid. I’ve had one job here at Harvard Business School. Who am I? What risks have I taken? I have tenure but I am so inspired by what I see. I’m going to call them young people, and not just young people. They have such imagination. They know how to use these technologies to change the world. I love being able to observe, and help. I even did a startup myself. We have a startup that I haven’t raised money and everything. We actually got selected twice by a fast company as an innovation company to watch, but what you need is money.

As my partners are telling me, “You need the money to build a business.” I’m staying focused as they want me to. To me, I just love to be. I’m so lucky to be a professor. Always, they get younger and younger. I get older and older, but they keep me fascinated. Doing these other businesses with former students say, “Professor Hill, can we do this together? Do you want to help me with that? Can I help you with getting your ideas out?” To me, there’s so much to be excited about.

It’s great that you’ve maintained that excitement over the course of your career, probably a good place for us to stop because I’m mindful you’ve got lots of other things to do, including spending book bet and deadlines.

Thank you. My pleasure. I appreciate it.

I appreciate it, too. You covered a lot of ground. Did a great fly-by of your various books, including the one coming out next year. Thank you again.

Thank you, lovely to see you again.

Take care.

—

I want to thank Linda for joining me to discuss your career beginnings, and a few of her many areas of focus as a researcher. We did a fly-by of her books and talked briefly about some of the other things she’s up to and what she sees ahead. There’s a lot that we can learn from her work. If you’d like to work on your career journey, visit PathWise.Io. You can become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Linda Hill – LinkedIn
• Collective Genius
• Being the Boss
• Becoming a Manager
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About Linda Hill

Linda Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative. She’s regarded as one of the top experts on leadership and innovation.

Linda is the author or co-author of Collective Genius, Being the Boss, and Becoming a Manager. She is also a co-founder of Paradox Strategies and of InnovationForce, a SaaS company using AI and machine learning to accelerate the process of innovation, which was named by Fast Company as a 2023 “Innovative Company to Watch.” She has been named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten management thinkers on multiple occasions.