As Maureen Dowd at the NYT points out, “Mayer’s bold move looks retro and politically incorrect, but she may feel the need to reboot the company culture, harness creativity, cut deadwood and discipline slackers before resuming flexibility.” She seems to be pulling all the stops in her arsenal. Are they enough?

I am a believer in the fuel of interactions to ignite crazy ideas and unexpected collaborations. I believe in establishing “creativity rooms” meant to encourage such interactions in a more inviting way than the simple isolated coffee-machine-on-a-bench. These are the places where the oral traditions responsible for a culture of success are passed down from one employee to the next, from one generation to the succeeding one. In the same way in which it has been done throughout millennia in every primitive and sophisticated society in history. The memo from Yahoo CHRO Jackie Reses (that “some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings”) suggests that this believe is shared by the company leadership.

It is the way in which the directive was issued that I find baffling. Susan Gunelis, president and CEO of Keysplash Creative, a marketing and communications company said it well on NPR’s Talk of the Nation: “Everyone was talking on line about how this mandate was such a step back for parents, for work-life home balance; but for me, what really made me annoyed about the mandate was that it was a blanket mandate, that it applied to everyone”, adding “we've all worked at a company where you've had a boss who, one employee is doing something - maybe one employee is coming in late all the time. So the boss sends out an email basically reprimanding everyone, and reminding everyone of the policy and possibly creating a time clock - now, everyone needs to punch the time clock - when really, it's only one or two people who are ruining it.

This is the crux of the problem: leadership in bulk. If the issue is about sparking innovation, the solution has to be of an individual nature. It is about creating the space for every single employee to be at her best, to deliver his highest performance, to dream up ideas, whether for code-writing or the new advertising campaign, that no other could come up with. And to do that, each employee needs to be treated uniquely. Create a culture of empowerment, where managers are given the trust to lead their group in unique ways. Where interdependence is an understood concept practiced every day. Where employees are given the space to telecommute when needed by them and to be at work when needed by the company.

Trust your managers to create unique solutions for unique lives. Yes, it takes time to know each one of the employees in your group but, if the organization is well designed, if groups are not oversized and managers are not being asked to overstretch, this is what leadership is about. The role of the leader—in recruiting, hiring, and managing—is to understand what it takes to preserve the space for discovery and invention.

As leaders we must maximize our ability to draw out the full potential of our best performers and coax from them the driving force to make it happen. Getting to know the creative personalities—their personal passions, their idiosyncrasies and strengths—is a priority in delivering breakthrough innovation. This calls for flexibility, not for blanket mandates.

As the ultimate expression of flexibility, I believe it is our job as leaders to adapt our management style to the individual personalities of those in our groups—scientists, technicians, administrative personnel—rather than the other way around. This is not about being wishy-washy or inconsistent in your ways. It is also not about making it easy on you. It is about having the flexibility to be exactly the best supervisor for a given person at a given moment, which translates into every single person having a supervisor with a different style. Not a supervisor with different values, views, priorities, or expectations, but rather a supervisor who is also an individual coach. But a supervisor capable of adapting her style and of becoming more like an individual’s private coach or personal developer than a boss. Understand what kind of work environment suits which individual, under what circumstances the individual is motivated or not motivated, and what hidden strengths need to be developed. And have the creativity and the guts to make happen the working conditions that the individual needs.

Individual lives ask for individual solutions. Ms. Mayer has shown us that she understands that well: her role as a CEO demands that her baby nursery be right next to her office. A creative—and unique, it seems—solution. Extending this understanding to the lives and situations of her employees would go a long ways in finding the innovative core that each one needs to bring to Yahoo on a daily basis.

We learn about the drivers and the approaches of this leader development industry from the The Economist's Schumpeter column this week, Davos Man and his defects. The need for accountability, the importance of multi-cultural life experiences, the necessity of local focus. But the true gem is found in its closing paragraph, when the column goes back to a leader who is very much in center stage these days, Lincoln, who understood well that “nearly all men can stand adversity but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Schumpeter concludes with this note of wisdom: “If leadership has a secret sauce, it may well be humility.”

Nancy Kohen understands the depths of Lincoln’s leadership and his impact better than most. In her recent article in the NYT, Lincoln's School of Management, she summarizes some of his dimensions, from the importance of resilience, forbearance, emotional intelligence, thoughtful listening and the consideration of all sides of an argument to the value of staying true to a larger mission. And, most importantly, she brings us Lincoln’s ablility “to experience a range of emotions without acting on them rashly or in other ways that compromised his larger mission.” 

Lincoln gives us the perspective to understand that true leadership starts with these kernels of wisdom:

Humility. Understanding that our role as leaders is not to serve our thirst for the trappings of power, but to serve those we lead. Leadership is service, not self-aggrandizement. Leadership as service flourishes when there is no personal agenda of acquisition, when the leader is free to serve and to lead with the best interests of others at heart, while releasing the need to prove himself to be above or below others.

Self awareness. You need to discover who you are before you can lead others, before you can help them, and before they will trust you. And discovering who you are is about awareness: seeing underneath our actions, habits, and patterns and seeing the beliefs that feed those desires and emotions. Only when you see clearly what fuels your emotions can you accept them and let them go, or change them.

Mindfulness. The art of giving full attention to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are taking place at the moment, at each moment, and moment by moment, is the key to all appropriate response. Mindfulness brings a capacity for penetrating clarity, a way of seeing things as they really are, that has tremendous power. And when true reality emerges, a leader can understand the situation in its entirety. From this awareness of what is really happening evolves the detachment that provides a leader with his strongest suit: the understanding that his energy yields its greatest output when it goes into caring and developing, not into controlling, and that it is his participation, not his control, that is required. It is this realization that allows leaders to stay centered and feel fulfillment through hail and storm—as did Lincoln.

For leaders, the day-to-day life can lead to fear as they manage conflict, take unpopular stands, say no to a boss, a customer, or an employee. Leaders who do not experience it this way have either learned to remain centered through deep awareness or are not pushing themselves beyond a safe comfort zone and are thus avoiding personal risk—and missing great opportunities and eroding group morale and esprit de corps.

Fear is not pointless. If it is met with awareness, it can be energizing. Though commonly regarded as the absence of fear, courage is rather the willingness to go right through fear. Courage is the readiness to feel the fear, see it, accept it without judgment, experience the sensation, and act anyway. The key to facing our fears and turning their power over us into energy behind us is to go deep within us, understand their roots, confront them, and let them go. 

Despite the potential of doom-and-gloom of its analysis, the Economist’s Leader  argues for the continued impact of innovation as an engine for growth and productivity and suggests, reminding us of Twain, that “fears that innovation is slowing are exaggerated.” In the briefing the arguments that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades and the world is on a technological plateau receive the characteristic in-depth analysis of the rate of progress of technology through history, the role and response of government, and the like. Worth the read indeed. But only when it briefly mentions that technology-led growth neither continues unabated nor declines steadily through history nor declines steadily, or it argues, again briefly, that governments help best by getting out of the way of entrepreneurs, can one intuit that there is something essential that drives innovation: the innovators themselves.

NPR’s first Morning Edition of the year  brings the discussion on innovation close to the innovator herself. Complementing The Economist’s acknowledgement of technology-led growth experiencing ebbs and flows, NPR quotes Sam Arbesman of the Kaufmann Foundation, on two important aspects of innovation: the nature of discovery and our ability to recognize it. On the former, he knows that discoveries are not necessarily single big bang events but are often the accumulation of smaller insights, smaller ideas, smaller discoveries. Take plate tectonics. I just came back from California where we celebrated the 90th birthday of my advisor, Bob Coleman, one of the founding fathers of plate tectonics. As Allan Cox was beginning to understand the magnetic signature of the oceanic crust, Bob was adding his interpretation of rocks found on land as representing older oceanic crust. And Gary Ernst was looking at how these rocks changed during mountain building. The theory is very coherent now. But back in the 70s, it was neither obvious nor immediate. It was about putting smaller insights together. And it would have been hard to predict its impact 20 years earlier. Which brings us to Arbesman’s second point: "The truth is, we don't really have a good track record at predicting which ones are going to be relevant in the long term," he says, "And we want to make sure that we support the creation of knowledge. And to do that, we have to really make sure that we support everything all across the board. That means, of course, most of the time we will be supporting research that may fill in facts around the edges but won't be revolutionary."

In leading innovation you need to trust the drive of innovators, and to trust your own instincts. We need to give innovators space, to trust where they are leading us. Even though sometimes it is only clear to them. It takes a long-term commitment to innovation to do this. Corning Incorporated is a corporation that has known and practiced this. It has learned that there is value in letting inspired scientists and leaders in their field pursue inventions with no apparent immediate application. And it has reaped the benefits of this philosophy. In the 1970s, by resuscitating a non-melting process for making the highest purity glass, one that had been invented by one of its scientists puttering around forty years earlier and, finding no application, had been properly documented and shelved, was able to jump ahead of the competition with a manufacturing process for optical fiber still unmatched in efficiency, control, and flexibility. Similarly, the process the company uses for manufacturing its precision flat glass used today in computers, televisions, and smart phones was archived for many years after proving too expensive for the windshield application for which it was first conceived and invented.

I am fully convinced that the fundamental drive of creativity that inspires innovators to follow a trail that only they seem to be able to sniff and only a few people are able to match in understanding is alive and well. And I encourage those leading them and creating opportunities to have the patient support for their ideas to turn into applications. There is no paucity of ideas and energy and new opportunities. Ask GenFlux who are leading the way. 

Originally published as an HBR article, she shares with us aspects from freedom to trust to accountability. It is worth a read. Take a look.

Support Creatives to Stand on Their Own

Holding people accountable, not just for achieving results but for expressing respect for others through their behavior, can at times be uncomfortable or even gut-wrenching. That is part of our role. But another significant part is the more uplifting one of supporting them in finding their driving force and freeing it up to channel their energy and creativity. Both roles are needed in managing conflict. Whether for the soft-spoken team member first feeling unwelcome by his new group with towering figures and strong personalities or for the creative experiencing the blocking of passive-aggressive behavior of others, guiding their own exploration into understanding their source of energy and strength, assertiveness and disarming tactics will clear obstructions to the flow needed to deliver results. 

Balance Personalities to Realize Team Dynamics

The goal is not—and it never should be—to eliminate the discussions or to shy away from disagreements and heated arguments. Instead the goal is to capture the energy of disparate viewpoints and use it to move the team forward rather than slowing it down. The goal is to achieve a state of “creative conflict,” which allows all the voices to be heard, and thus to find a robust solution. Deep knowledge of the experts and creatives in a group enables an understanding of the interaction between personalities that is critical to assembling them into teams that are constructive in dialogue and productive in delivery. Achieving synergistic teams can be challenging at times, and may not even work as expected. Improving team dynamics, communication and knowledge flow may require the assignment of other team members whose main role is to improve team communications and result delivery.

These two elements, of supporting people to be aware of who they are and accountable for their behavior towards others, and of balancing the personalities as they interact with one another sets the tone for the establishment of a culture of empowerement, where creatives can be ahead of the facts  and every person is encouraged to follow their spark against all obstacles and supported in so doing.

Know and Understand the Experts

For the leader, it starts with you knowing your people, their reactions and expectations, their roles in the team. Making conflict into a force of creation, not destruction, is about understanding each one of the players for who they are, where they come from, what drives them, and what they can bring to the solution. I recently read a column listing the 10 things that employees should keep away from their boss. You know, all the personal stuff. But this understanding is essential for the leader driven to motivate creatives and promote their careers to deliver innovation. This understanding is also essential to manage conflict—through the understanding of conditioning that enables behavioral change.

And to effect change self-understanding is imperative to the practitioners. Thus, the most powerful tool in managing behavior-driven conflict is self-management resulting from self-awareness. The ultimate goal of creating a culture where innovation thrives and amazing transformation is possible would elude us if team members lack the awareness of their own personal role in conflict and its solution.

Define Roles Clearly to Inhibit Unproductive Conflict

Often times it is not personalities, but organizational issues, mainly lack of clarity on roles and goals, that are at the heart of conflict. And so, just as important as understanding passions and managing personalities is defining roles that are clear to each and all team members, roles that are understood and respected by all but that may be reviewed and refined as projects evolve.

Clear understanding of business imperatives by all sides, from research to development to commercial groups, must precede clear definition of roles, links and responsibility. Defining and insisting on these three fundamentals eliminate frustrating and conflicting stumbling blocks (second-guessing, circuitous approval paths) and replace them by a streamlined delivery process.

These two, knowing those in your group and defining their roles clearly, are the fundamental aspects in addressing conflict and turning it into a creative force. The individual is at the heart of all ideas, and is also at the heart of all interactions—and hence all conflict. So knowing not only what drives their passion but what drives their reaction to others is a must. Just as is streamlining decision-making and execution through clear role definition.

Different visions propelled by contrasting personalities often start fires: the forceful expert who does not lose an argument is not going to yield easily to the new team member who has a hard time getting floor time. The favored of the gods is going to be intimidating to the bright, quiet personality who does not get a word in. The untouchable whose work rides on the ideas of others will demoralize teams along its path. I have encountered these personalities in my teams and you can probably identify them in your own teams as well. And though it may be easier for leaders to ignore the ensuing conflict than to address it, shoving it under the rug can mean lost opportunities: ideas that were not heard, risks that were ignored. To gain from all, every personality and every conflict that it encounters need to be led in a unique way. And to do this a leader needs first to know and understand her team members.

The goal is not to eliminate conflict but to capture ideas and turn them into energy that propels teams forward. It is not about running polite teams, but about understanding players and moving from the impasse of conflict to the space of respect. It is about managing the dynamics among disparate personalities and making everyone accountable for their behavior and their delivery. And by so doing, creating a space of trust: trust that you will be heard and supported. So add a couple more things beyond knowing your team members: support each of your creatives to stand on their own while balancing their personalities.

Not all conflict, however, is driven by individuals and their differences in personalities, visions or styles. In my experience, in addition to these two—individual and interactive—there are two other major conflict-driving elements: organizational and leadership.

Organizations contribute to conflict through the unclear definition of team roles and responsibilities and the lack of adherence to defined roles and responsibilities. These result in circuitous paths and poor execution, delayed timelines, low motivation and customer confusion—all-powerful time bombs. It is imperative that leaders define roles clearly and repeatedly—and insist on respect for roles from team members as well as from management time and time over again.

Most importantly, a lack of perception by leadership to incidents and practitioners, a distance from the fray, and a lack of courage to address situations compromises its ability to lead, hampers culture-creation, and creates the perception of lacking backbone. So find your courage, understand and define your values, and live them in integrity.

In summary, in moving from viewing conflict as a force of destruction to understanding conflict as a creative force, leaders will be wise to know and understand their experts. To support each of them to stand on their own. To balance their personalities. To define their roles and responsibilities. To insist on respect for these roles. And, most importantly, to find their own courage as leaders and jump into the ring of fire and address conflict.

"No Rush: In Praise of Procrastination”  juxtaposes businesses’ obsession with speed and their other pressing obsession: innovation. Their reaction to these contrasting forces can be paradoxical, such as that of high-tech giants Google and Hewlett-Packard, who used to give unscheduled time that allowed employees to work on their own projects, now cutting back on that “tinkering time” or policing it carefully!

In comes, Schumpeter contrasts, Frank Partnoy’s book “Wait: The Art and Science of Delay”  balancing the equation with its fresh position that taking control of time and slowing down our responses yields better results in almost every arena of life … even when time seems to be of the essence.

In the context of creativity and innovation, the speed vs. procrastination dilemma, is part of a broader, essential question. It is superseded by the value that is given to time as a tool for exploration and discussion. The value placed on time is a core element that so clearly defines the very nature of a culture that it can be sensed when you are part of a group. Time that is chopped up into bits and segments is experienced as feverish activity and confusion, and it is not productive time. But most significantly, it has a harsh impact on the creative process. Have you ever tried to force the flow of creative juices, whether in writing or in designing with blocks and colors or in thinking of a new life-saving surgical procedure into the forty-five minutes between meetings? Or to work around the clock to deliver something new—not just to make calculations or put the presentation together or do the typing, but to create something new—by putting in ten hours a day several days in a row? The experienced inventive mind knows the answer very well: It just does not work that way. You feel either rushed or exhausted, and the ideas do not flow.

Minds who have often experienced the creative process know well what it feels like. The idea just arrives, it hits you, and there is no stopping it. Or, in its absence, when the energy and the idea do not show up, there is not much point in forcing it. One might as well do something else while it arrives. Clean the fridge, as Schumpeter tells us was Ernest Hemingway’s first thing to do in writing a novel.

Though not widely accepted, we are all capable of receiving the flow of creative ideas. Creativity is not the domain of a few. Yes, some of us experience it often, with new ideas flowing all the time. And of those “creative types” some are also good at materializing their ideas into a new something: a product, a book, a song, a medical procedure. But we are all capable of eliciting that thought that comes from “you don’t know where.” It is a matter of having an uncluttered mind in a receptive mode. In an innovative organization, everybody, from creative to administrative assistant to mail delivery person, feels empowered to come up with new and better ways of doing things. In her TED talk “Your elusive creative genius”  Elizabeth Gilbert shares the idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius, and brings to life the capriciousness of the creative process, one that—as everybody who has ever tried to make something—behaves more paranormally than rationally. She relates the experiences of the poet Ruth Stone and the musician Tom Waits who received not just their inspiration, but the lines to their poems and lyrics in bolts of lightning at the most unexpected of times.  

It is common knowledge that the best ideas come when you least expect them—in the shower, during a nature walk, in the drowsiness of dawn, even in dreams. The answer you need flows when the uncluttered mind has the space that allows it to arrive. It is then that you have access to the sharp insights, the intuition, that hard-to-explain immediate knowing that does not need to rely on rational or logical processes. Ideas and the passion behind them need uncluttered time to flow, and the leader should therefore allow for “negative space,” time for passion to flourish and ideas to break free. To understand this is to know the essence of the creative process. A frenetic work pace allows time only for today’s pressing tasks. But creativity is inversely related to the number of tasks being worked on. The leader must actively clear clutter and distraction and push scientists to eschew frenetic work habits and overwork. Ask yourself: Do practitioners really need to attend all those meetings? Is it really important for them to fill out time sheets? How frequently does upper management need progress reports? The answers are obvious and the solutions simple, though they may require a shifting of habits. Most importantly, the shift in habits requires that you, the leader, be relentless in defending the time of your team and in not overscheduling their days; not every scientist is needed at every meeting when one team representative will do. And do not attempt to keep track of what they do and when they do it. Assigned time is enough for accounting; more spaced short highlights, rather than frequent long reports, better meet the requirements of upper management.

Cultures differ in the value they place on time for creation. The idea that “negative space” is creative and valuable time is not shared by all cultures. Groups that have been expected to value busy-ness and the frenzy of constant activity are conditioned by their leader to stay in that high-intensity mode and may have difficulty shifting gears. I do not mean to advocate innovation delivery in the absence of timelines. More than the elimination of deadlines, what the creative mind needs is freedom to allocate its time. Ideas and the passion behind them need the time to flow, and the experienced creative mind knows well how to manage time between well-defined short-term deadlines and unbounded greenfield research.

The notion that researchers should be “free” to do exploratory research on Friday afternoons is ludicrous and needs to be replaced with the notion that researchers should be free to do exploratory research when the inspiration strikes. So, encourage your group to learn to recognize the flow of intuitive thought that brings new ideas and to defend the space it needs. Encourage them to learn to recognize when the ideas are not flowing, to stop in their tracks and look elsewhere, with no specific goal in mind. Or to clean the fridge until the flow comes to them.

Conflict is expressed in many ways, affecting the daily lives of team members, punctuating the way they interact, influencing the culture of the organization, and having an effect on projects and results. We need to face it: in any endeavor that relies on human beings bringing in ideas to achieve a goal conflict will arise. It is a natural expression of the desire to advance a vision, of the essential diversity in personalities and behaviors within a team, of the manifestation of the creatives’ own self-image, their conditioning, their insecurities. Conflict is often driven by strong egos enlarging their arena while vying for control, and lack of role definition adds powerful fuel to its fire. If ignored, conflict has the power to overcome all efforts to create a positive environment for it can polarize teams, erode self-confidence, and shatter motivation. It also has the power to slow, even halt, progress. But having the guts, the resilience, and the perseverance to address conflict, regardless of its cause, has a dominant influence on the culture of the organization—and on its ability to deliver results.

So it is important to learn to understand at what time argument—an essential force in creative discovery and advancement—becomes unhealthy. If a little conflict can be good and too much can be destructive, where is the break? How does a manager deal with a creative group that is becoming dysfunctional? Leadership needs to ask of itself these questions:

• How to create a vibrant culture of trust where all are given space?

• Where the exchange can be a source of energy and inspiration, and the reaction from others a source of ideas?

• Where ego and pride do not get in the way?

• Where conflicts get resolved and resolution builds solution?

Not all agree with this doomsday scenario. Fast Company's Robert Safian, in coming up with his Gen Flux concept shows an understanding of the passion that drives creativity as a relenting and unstoppable force. We also need leadership who can create the space for innovative drivers to spread their wings, manage the conflict that will ensue and balance freedom and rigor, as I discuss in a recent guest blog for Amacom. Take a look at it.

I like his coming from left field in creative ways, as in this entry on creatives and their ideas, and his putting together a historical perspective, as in this one on leadership with our current, seemingly unrelated era. He recently interviewed me on a street park in New York and we talked about leading creative teams, innovation and culture. Check it out.

They are not concept and theory, but daily practices of prodding here, cajoling there, so all elements resonate as one and create one culture; so that all members feel part of one same effort, and feel the respect of being treated individually, one person at a time. My Seven Passions of Innovation are:

1. Looking at creative conflict in the eyes and flexing for resolution. Jumping into the ring of fire and embracing the conflict that inevitably arises as the different experiences and viewpoints of creatives emerge as different ideas, often opposing, and driven, at times violently, by the energy that fuels them.

2. Bringing together teams of diverse, highly intelligent people, who show a vibrancy in their personal lives, freely in a way that engages their deepest personal motivations. Their interests, skills, and collaborations create the persona of the group.

3. Living values that set creativity free, values that resonate with you as a leader and that are both conducive to the expansion of the creative spirit and to the spirit of excellence and rigor that is paramount in taking visions and dreams to physical reality.

4. Insisting on excellence and results by coaxing individuals and teams to let their intuition and drive guide them while instilling a spirit of high performance and focusing on commitment to make it happen.

5. Cultivating a culture that honors time for intuitive flow, a culture of creative engagement within the intimacy of a single group, one defined by beliefs, attitudes, energy, interaction style, and practices. This is a practice that can extend from group to large organization, one that differs sharply from the top-down approaches common to reengineering efforts.

6. Defining an organizational structure that guides, but allows solutions to come from many permutations of talent and function. A clear structure that will inform the interactions, the roles and the responsibilities of every single person and, in so doing will eliminate barriers and frustrations and provide every one with a raison d’être.

7. Providing authentic leadership with the will to manage, the guts to decide, the wisdom to guide, and the passion to make innovation happen. Authentic leadership necessitates the development of the self-awareness and acceptance that allows you as a leader to stay centered, to be impassioned and detached, and in so doing to be motivational and inspirational on one hand, and to guide the raft through whitewater on the other.

The world of innovation is competitive and fast moving. Winning in today’s world requires not only unique insight and real creativity, but demands multidisciplinary teams delivering together. With complexity and high pace, normal innovation processes—strategic analysis, idea identification and opportunity selection, portfolio management practices, project management and stage gate processes—are necessary but not sufficient to generate real breakthroughs.

Strategy and processes only take you so far if the human the drive of innovation is not addressed, employees are not empowered and a solid culture of innovation is absent. When embedded in organizations, culture is the transforming force of companies. We all know global corporations with excellent fundamental capabilities who also understand what they need to do to become competitive, but where the basic behaviors are not being addressed, and they are staying on the sidelines, far from their goal as innovator leaders.

Needless to say, leading fast-paced innovation teams puts the most seasoned of leaders to the test. To hold together the responsibilities of the role, a successful leader needs backbone, moral fiber, chutzpah, and spiritual fortitude. But it does not stop there. To guide intense, high-energy teams, a leader needs to be passionate; impassioned practitioners are naturally at odds with apathetic leadership and the ambiguous results it elicits. But a leader’s passion must be authentic; it cannot be put on or imposed from outside. Leaders need to be true to themselves while carrying out their roles. Following a recipe and going through the mechanics, even if the symbols are there, will neither create a culture nor motivate teams.

The drive, the energy that makes the seemingly impossible task take shape and deliver breakthroughs, is the intuitive force that inspires and guides creativity. As leaders what we need is to motivate by balancing liberating forces with an insistence on excellence.

My perception of what it takes to create cultures where innovation thrives was shaped by experiences at home as a teen, in graduate school, and as a young researcher in academic and industrial organizations. Later, as team leader with a group growing in size and the projects in complexity, and as other groups became my responsibility, my understanding of the nature of the role also grew. In time, I defined seven principles that I found essential to drive new ideas to materialize. I created group cultures where innovation thrived, as did the creatives themselves who made up those groups. We delivered results that were at times considered unlikely. And we had fun together.

I have now summarized my learnings, and chronicled the stories, struggles and successes of many a creative in the upcoming book Leadership that Liberates Creativity and Accelerates Innovation. Through this blog I want to create a forum for a live discussion with you, the community that shares my interest—and, for some, my passion—on this significant aspect today.

I look forward to a lively exchange where we learn from each other through your input and questions.