The New Leadership Structures that Unblock Innovation

Deal is not just another payroll platform. It's one your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally. Built in house, built for peace of mind. Visit deel.com/hbr. The best b to b marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. When you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/ideacast. That's linkedin.com/ideacast. Terms and conditions apply. A new digital reading experience from Harvard Business Review is here. It's the HBR interactive issue. Swipe through pages, search each issue, and listen to articles with audio narration. The interactive issue is available now to all HBR Print Magazine subscribers. Not yet a subscriber to the HBR Print Magazine? I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Allison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Alright, Allison. So every organization wants to innovate, right? Not just once, but over and over again. And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this. Right? They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough? Am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders? When actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action. Yeah. I think we know from research that a lot of the best innovation comes from the front lines as well as R and D departments. But then how do you harness those ideas, create effective experiments, and ultimately scale the ones that work? And if you're a leader, how are you overseeing all of these disparate efforts and then prioritizing the ones in which you really wanna invest? So today's guest has been drawing the playbook for innovation for much of her career. Linda Hill, professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book Collective Genius about a decade ago and has just published a new one, Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation. She's gonna explain how to create a system and build a team that can innovate and then cascade the new thinking throughout the enterprise. Here's our conversation. So you've written a book about innovation. You know, I would say this is a time when some leaders are in survival mode. A lot are uncertain about AI. How should leaders be thinking about innovation right now? I think innovation is really an imperative, and it is about survival. It is not about, you know, anything extra. Because nowadays, we have to be able to adapt and respond to whatever is happening out there in the world, and it's a very uncertain world. Talk a little bit about the misconceptions surrounding innovation, because I feel you've been spending much of your career trying to deflate some myths about how innovation happens. Well, this is the second book we've written about innovation. The first one was called Collective Genius. And there, we tried to understand what …