Smarter Collaboration

8 Leading and Sustaining a Collaborative Transformation

One day not long ago, the topic under discussion in a Harvard Law School classroom was leadership: specifically, how people motivate others to advance a company’s strategy. The faculty member leading the discussion was Heidi Gardner, one of this book’s coauthors. A student who had previously worked at a prestigious investment bank volunteered some thoughts about leaders there.

“The managing directors,” he said, “would come in and sit down with us analysts and talk about the deals that we’d closed—not the size, but the impact. Like, ‘You’re all aware that we recently helped with the IPO [initial public offering] of a medical-devices company. This was a tough project, and the team really ...