Linda Hill, Harvard Business School Prof
Today my guest is Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Chair of the Leadership Initiative. Linda is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership and innovation and is the co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press 2014), co-founder of Innovation Force and Paradox Strategies, and co-creator of the Innovation Quotient and re:Route.
She was named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten management thinkers in the world in 2013 and 2021 and received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2015. Linda’s Collective Genius has also been named to the inaugural Thinkers50 Booklist: 10 Management Classics for 2022. Linda has chaired and presently chairs numerous HBS Executive Education programs, including the Young Presidents’ Organization Presidents’ Seminar, the High Potentials Leadership Program, Leading in the Digital Era, and Leading and Building a Culture of Innovation. She was course-head during the development of the Leadership and Organizational Behavior MBA required course. Linda holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and an MA/PhD from University of Chicago.
In this candid conversation, Linda shared her deep insights into the mechanics of collective genius, the critical difference between leading change and leading innovation, and the specific capabilities organizations need to build the future.
1. The Three Muscles of Innovation. Linda revealed that leading innovation isn’t about dictating a grand vision and expecting people to blindly follow; instead, it is about creating an environment where people are willing and able to “co-create the future”. To do this, leaders must build three distinct organizational muscles: “creative abrasion” (creating a robust marketplace of ideas through debate and amplifying diverse thoughts), “creative agility” (experimenting and acting your way to the future), and “creative resolution” (making patient, inclusive decisions without letting bosses or experts dominate the process).
2. Delivering Hope Through Customer Intimacy. When establishing a shared sense of purpose to drive innovation, Linda highlighted the immense power of “customer intimacy”. She shared a profound example of Pfizer’s global clinical supply group, who actively visited patients in their homes during trials rather than just focusing on delivering physical vials to pharmacists. By deeply understanding the end-to-end patient experience, their core purpose shifted to “delivering hope,” which ultimately enabled them to successfully run the massively complex COVID-19 vaccine trials in a record 266 days.
3. Building Ecosystems Over Empires. Expanding on her upcoming book Scaling Genius, Linda explained that modern breakthrough innovation can no longer happen entirely inside a single company’s walls. Because no organization can simply buy all the technology and talent it needs, modern leaders must become “bridgers” who excel at co-creating beyond their own corporate boundaries. She noted that massive companies like MasterCard and Microsoft now rely heavily on building the social fabric of external ecosystems and partnerships to achieve their technological goals.
4. The Self-Taught Leader. Despite her prestigious role at Harvard Business School, Linda firmly believes that you cannot actually teach someone how to lead; you can only help them teach themselves. She explained that leadership is fundamentally a self-development process based on acquiring practical stretch assignments and building trusting networks. To effectively foster innovation, leaders must actively work on their own micro-behaviors, such as learning to ask guiding questions rather than making statements, or adopting the habit of a former Sony chairman who famously refused to speak for the first 20 minutes of meetings to ensure he didn’t accidentally stifle the group’s diversity of thought.
