Collective Genius

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Why Collective Genius Needs Leadership: The Paradoxes of Innovation

Managing tensions in the organization is an ongoing issue … you don't want an organization that just salutes and does what you say. You want an organization that argues with you. And so you want to nurture the bottoms up, but you've got to be careful you don't just degenerate into chaos.

—Bill Coughran, then senior vice president, engineering, infrastructure group, Google

We've described how innovative organizations need more than talented people. They also need leaders who can create and sustain a place—a context or environment—that unlocks the slice of genius in each of their people and then combines them into collective genius. And we described how leaders create that ...