Collective Genius Quotes

“Complete anarchy rarely produces anything useful. In every setting, some degree of structure seems to help a group produce something worthwhile. The question is, how much? It is the role and burden of the leader to wrestle with this question constantly. We”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“If your goal is innovation, then your role must instead be to create an environment—a setting, a context, an organization—where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation themselves: to collaborate, learn through trial and error, and make integrated decisions.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Because “litigation is local,” as one lawyer explained, Pfizer couldn't send corporate lawyers from one state to argue cases before judges and juries in other states, where they might be viewed with suspicion.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“The problem with chunking is that it leads a group to lose any sense of the whole, of how the parts fit together, which reduces the possibility of recombining the parts in new and betterways.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Indeed, we consider rapid and clear-cut decision making a hallmark of good leadership. Those who seem to put off choices are likely to hear people grumble, “What we need around here is some real leadership.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Brilliant solutions don't occur spontaneously, especially for the kind of complex problem we saw at Google. They come from working through ideas, options, alternatives, even failures and mistakes, and combining them in new ways to find the best solution”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“But from the larger perspective—obviously the more important one, given Coughran's mandate—it was indeed about integration: valuable ideas were developed by the team whose ideas weren't used right away in the next storage system. But Coughran recognized their potential value and made sure they remained in consideration for solutions even further down the road.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“For that, they felt, the team had to “bump up” (clearly one of Coughran's favorite metaphors) against reality, and so Polizzi pressed it to bring its system to a semi-operational state and run performance and scalability tests.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Yet an engineering review was anything but a simple update. A key purpose, in Coughran's words, was “to force teams to assess their progress relative to their goals.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“We're just different in the way we go about making decisions,” Whitman said. “We have heated debates. We reach consensus or I make a decision. If I am wrong, I change it, and I don't take myself too seriously. But we made a pact that when we leave the room, you support the position. Very early on, we were explicit about that.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“The most innovative teams proceed neither by detailed plans nor by no plans at all. Instead, they alternate brief periods of planning with longer periods of execution and improvisation. They scope out the problem or challenge, define a general direction to pursue for a solution, pursue it—if possible, by building a prototype to test in the real world, adapt it, learn, pause to do some brief replanning, and then try again, over and over.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“The most innovative teams proceed neither by detailed plans nor by no plans at all. Instead, they alternate brief periods of planning with longer periods of execution and improvisation.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“the staff quickly realized that not every off-the-wall idea was worth trying. Hard questions needed asking: Is this consistent with our purpose and values? How will we know if it's succeeding? Can we scale it if it works?”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“To Groß-Selbeck, the experiments were proof positive that his people could pursue new ideas quickly and effectively without going through an arduous corporate development process. And it could be done with manageable risk if it was contained on a small part of the site.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“In systems, for example, Brandeau wanted more than technology whizzes. He wanted people with a mosaic of different talents, sensibilities, personalities, subject-matter expertise, backgrounds, age, and so on.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Instead, the evidence is clear that most innovations arise from the collision of different ideas, perspectives, and ways of processing information.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Any problem is hard to deal with when no one considers it a real problem.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“We thought we knew,” Brandeau said, “how our universe worked and could use that understanding to handle whatever came up. Now we began to wonder if maybe we didn't understand it as well as we thought.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Experience had taught Brandeau that two heads with complementary skills were often better than one when a group needed leadership with high levels of both technical and managerial skills.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Innovation requires all members of a group to keep in mind the whole problem, the way all of its parts are interdependent, rather than focusing on or trying to optimize one part.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Yet innovators, we've found, consistently pay attention to data. They not only pay attention to it, but actively and voraciously collect and analyze it.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“If “be data driven” sounds obvious, recall how often groups make choices in spite of hard evidence because members didn't like what the evidence was telling them.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“As his people began involving the markets more in the development of strategy and key initiatives, de Meo noticed there was far less complaining from the field about “those guys in Wolfsburg.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“The HCL intranet started buzzing about the plans on My Blueprint. Knowledge sharing increased well beyond Nayar's initial hopes. People helped each other refine their plans.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Why shouldn't the question asking go both ways? He had many problems he was struggling to solve. Why not ask employees?”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“What bothered me was that I knew I didn't have the answers to their questions—but they probably did.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“They didn't share their ideas, let alone debate them with one another, and they weren't taking responsibility for company performance. Above all, they weren't willing to innovate to meet customers' increasingly complex and strategic needs. They expected management to set direction and come up with new ideas.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“Studio leadership at times did replace directors midway in a production when they failed to move the film forward on schedule. On those occasions, the problem was often the director's inability or unwillingness to enlist people's help in solving a story problem.”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“After experimenting with various approaches, Pixar adopted the tactic of asking the people involved to identify five ways the process of making the just completed film had worked well and five ways it hadn't (and how to change them).”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

“All involved must be comfortable with the reality that missteps, mistakes, and failures will happen. The leaders we studied always treated them as sources of learning and not occasions for censure and punishment. They did insist that people work quickly and nimbly”
― Linda A. Hill, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation