Collective Genius

Genio Colectivo. El arte y la práctica de liderar la innovación. Linda A. Hill. 2014. Harvard Business Review. 245 pp.

Contraportada

¿Por qué algunas organizaciones innovan una y otra vez, mientras que otras no? 

Se podría pensar que la clave de la innovación es atraer talentos excepcionales. O hacer las inversiones adecuadas. O romper los patrones tradicionales. Todas estas cosas pueden ayudar, pero sólo hay una manera de garantizar una innovación sostenida: hay que liderarla, y con un tipo especial de liderazgo. Collective Genius te dice cómo. La destacada académica en liderazgo Linda Hill, junto con el ex-mago de la tecnología de Pixar, Greg Brandeau, la investigadora del MIT Emily Truelove y el coautor de Being the Boss, Kent Lineback, encontraron en este estudio una suposición ampliamente compartida y errónea: que cualquier “buen” líder puede liderar la innovación. La verdad es que liderar la innovación requiere un tipo de liderazgo distintivo, uno que desencadene y aproveche el “genio colectivo” de las personas de la organización.

Utilizando historias vívidas de líderes de empresas como Volkswagen, Google, eBay y Pfizer, así como de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y agencias gubernamentales internacionales, los autores muestran cómo los líderes exitosos de la innovación no crean una visión e intentan hacer que la innovación suceda por sí misma. Más bien, crean y mantienen un ambiente donde se permite que la innovación ocurra una y otra vez, un lugar donde las personas están dispuestas y son capaces de hacer el arduo trabajo que requiere la solución innovadora de un problema. Collective Genius no sólo te inspirará; Te brindará la orientación práctica y concreta que necesitas para incorporar la innovación al espíritu de tu empresa.

Quotes 

My job is to set the stage, not to perform on it.

 

We're not just making up how to do computer-generated movies, we're making up how to run a company of diverse people who can make something together that no one could make alone.

—Ed Catmull, cofounder and president Pixar Studios

Managing tensions is an ongoing issue. You don't want an organization that just does what you say. You want an organization that argues with you. You want to nurture the bottoms up, but you don't want that to degenerate into chaos.

—Bill Coughran, senior vicepresident Google

If the CEO always thinks he is the owner and the doer, he will not accomplish anything. Leaders must enable people to do what they think, in their hearts, is the right thing to do. That is the future of leadership.

—Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

Marketing is an attitude. We have worked hard to create a global community that has the right attitude, works collaboratively, and delivers innovative marketing solutions that delight and surprise people.

—Luca de Meo, CMO, Volkswagen AG

Summary + Notes

INTRODUCCIÓN

Los grupos innovadores son capaces de generar y combinar las distintas dosis de genialidad de sus miembros para crear una única obra de genialidad colectiva. En lugar de intentar idear una visión y hacer que la innovación se haga realidad por si se misma, un líder de la innovación crea un lugar —un contexto, un ambiente— en el que las personas están dispuestas y son capaces de hacer el duro trabajo que requiere la solución innovadora de problemas. Primero, cómo crean los líderes organizaciones dispuestas a innovar. Segundo, cómo crean los líderes organizaciones capaces de innovar.

01. Cómo luce el genio colectivo: Ed Catmull, Pixar Studios

Keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. Everything in the film must be thought, chosen, and inserted by one of the hundreds of people involved.

Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.

Ultimate challenge of organizational innovation: to create a coherent work of singular collective genius to the diverse genius brought to the work.

Even with the right people , there's still the huge problem of getting them to work together productively.

Leaders creat collaborative organizations because innovation arises from the interplay of ideas that occur during the interactions of people with diverse expertise, experience, or points of view.

Leaders foster discovery driven learning by experimentation and repeated trial and error.

1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration

Leaders support and encourage integrative decision making. Integrating ideas, allowing difference, conflict and learning to be embraced and producing the most innovative solution. 

Constant iteration. Talent in the right context.

02. Por qué el genio colectivo necesita del liderazgo: las paradojas de la innovación

Managing tensions in the organization is an ongoing issue. You want to nurture te bottoms up, but you have to be careful it doesn't degenerate into chaos.
Unleash and harness, the fundamental paradox.
The paradoes of collaboration. The friction of clashing ideas.
Affirm the individual and the group. Encourage and support the individuals because they are the source of ideas.
Pixar's practices:
Daily review of personal contributions
Horizontal organization
Open spaces
Generous credit to all participants
Support and confrontation. Confrontation can stifle the willingness to offer ideas, but group members can become too supportive as well and stop challenging each other at all.
Discovery-driven learning. Foster experimentation, learning, and performance.  Experimentation and learning can be endless, performance exacts keep on time and budget.
Promote improvisation and structure. Feedback after the work is done. What things went right and what things went wrong. Distinguish the hierarchy for decision making from people's freedom to commmunicate.Give an old idea a new chance. Resist unnecessary structures and sysyems.
Show patience and urgency. Creative process will go on forever unless there is a hard stop. Constraints can sharpen thinking because they force the team to find ways to get around them.
Encourage bottom up initiative and intervene top down. 

The implications of the paradoxes. 

03. Replanteando el papel del líder: Vineet Nayar, HCL Technologies

Leaders enable people to do what these people think at their hearts was the right thing to do.

Outside problem. HCL, a declining traditional company focused on developing and selling products.

Bet. Change to a relationship between HCL people and the customer to solve their problems and transform her business. 

Inside problem. Complacent and reactive employees who didn't share nor debate their ideas. Managers focused on setting direction and making sure no one deviated from it.

Actions. Blueprint meeting of the company's top managers.

Set out a challenge: get the DSGi contract. Restructuration of the company around lines of business rather than geographic areas. Talent development programs that linked business goals to the individual learning needs of employees. Reviving a demoralized sales department through reorganization and new incentives to encourage big deals. Creation of a business finance group to make sure every deal was a win-win. Creation of MultiService Delivery Unit staffed with people selected through a rigorous process that considered technical and business skills.

Canging how people think. Inverting the pyramid. Employees first, customers second. Investing in employees developmnt, unleashing their potential. Focus on serving the value zone and those in it. Transparency. Smart Service Desk to raise issues or questions and only the employee could declare a ticket closed.

Scorecard system using automated project portals to keep track of work, performance and profitability visible to all project managers.

Employees First Councils Online Communities of comon interests generate ideas like the Business Aligned IT creating new business through unstructured innovation, creating alternatives from collaborating people outside the boundaries of ierarchy.

Business planning process transformed from one dominated by top-down judgements to peer to peer review. My Blueprint Intranet.

HCLites become innovative problem solvers. Innovation from the bottom up. 

Progress. Major contracts.

Pressed people to take personal responsability for organizational change.

Leaders as social architects.

Leaders create the willingness to innovate. People willing to innovate. People able to do the work.

PARTE I: LÍDERES QUE CREAN LA VOLUNTAD DE INNOVAR

04. Creando una comunidad: Luca de Meo, Volkswagen AG

Context. Local marketing subject to local CEO. Headquarters set parameters and each country adapt as they wanted. Marketing not strategic, global or innovative.

Challenge.

05. Más Allá del Propósito: Valores y Reglas de Compromiso. Kit Hinrichs, Pentagram

PARTE II: LÍDERES QUE CREAN LA HABILIDAD DE INNOVAR

6. Abrasión Creativa. Greg Brandeau, Pixar Studios

7. Agilidad Creativa. Philipp Justus, eBay

8. Resolución Creativa. Bill Coughran, Google

PART III: GENIO COLECTIVO 2.0: INVENTANDO EL FUTURO

9. Cultivando un Ecosistema de Innovación. Larry Smarr, Calit2 y Amy Schulman, Pfizer

Epílogo. ¿Dónde encontraremos a los líderes de la Innovación del Mañana?

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