Linda Hill

Linda Hill's Speech Descriptions

Linda Hill’s programs The Power of Leadership: Unleashing the Collective Genius in Your Organization and Leadership for Innovation: How to Create Collective Genius focus on her breakthrough approach that leadership is made up of a community of people willing to innovate.

Her idea of collaborative innovation and building communities of innovators help develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose values and rules of engagement. And they build capabilities by fostering intellectual diversity and debate (creative abrasion) high experimentation (creative agility) and integrative rather than compromise-driven solutions (creative resolution).

Her programs show how Steve Jobs, Pixar, and IBM, among others, use the highly collaborative community model to develop in their organizations the key capabilities required to get innovation done: collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision-making. Professor Hill details what organizations can do to develop leaders with the right mindset and talents.

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation
In this talk based on Dr. Hill’s book, a team of preeminent thinkers—former Pixar technology wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and writer and former executive Kent Lineback (Being the Boss)—reveal what is the inextricable, yet significant, link between leadership and innovation.

Based on extensive research at many of the world's top organizations, her talk makes the compelling argument that today's knowledge-intensive global economy demands innovation, not just as a competence, but as a much deeper part of the culture of the enterprise. With vivid real-life voices, rich ethnographic description, and expert guidance from authors who've led innovation and creativity firsthand in their own organizations, Dr. Hill helps audiences expand and deepen their leadership wisdom and competence for a new century.

The Power of Leadership:
Unleashing the Collective Genius in Your Organization

What does it take to build organizations that can innovate again and again? The short answer: the right leadership. In her new book, Collective Genius, Professor Hill shows exceptional leaders of innovation in action. Based on a decade of observations of leaders from across the globe, Hill reveals how they go about developing organizations where people are willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. They build communities with a shared purpose and consistent set of values and rules of engagement that allow individual slices of genius to be leveraged into collective genius. They develop in their organizations the key capabilities required to get innovation done: collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision-making. Professor Hill details what organizations can do to develop leaders with the right mindset and talents.

Leadership for Innovation: How to Create Collective Genius

From her research on companies that have achieved breakthrough innovations Professor Hill found a common leadership approach. Leaders at Pixar eBay Germany Google HCL Technologies and IBM among others build communities of people who are both willing and able to innovate. They develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose values and rules of engagement. And they build capabilities by fostering intellectual diversity and debate (creative abrasion) high experimentation (creative agility) and integrative rather than compromise-driven solutions (creative resolution).

Steve Jobs for example, after acquiring Pixar put tremendous design effort into a new facility for hundreds of employees designing it much like an Italian neighborhood with a central meeting place to foster a highly collaborative community. Vineet Nayar CEO of India's IT leader HCL Technologies introduced an "Employee First" mantra and encouraged the company's young employees to define their value system and goals building an ambitious trust-based community.