The 3 Types of Leaders of Innovative Companies

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Deborah Ancona and Kate Isaacs, researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management, say many companies struggle to be nimble with a command-and-control leadership culture. They studied Xerox’s R&D outfit PARC and the materials science company W.L. Gore & Associates and found these highly innovative organizations have three kinds of leaders: entrepreneurial, enabling, and architecting ones. These roles work together to give direction and avoid creative chaos. Ancona and Isaacs are coauthors of the HBR article "Nimble Leadership."

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Command and control has lost its mojo. Nowadays if you want to create an
0:50.4	innovative organization no one would tell you to build a rigid bureaucracy.
0:56.6	But what should you build?
0:58.1	How can you have creativity without chaos?
1:02.3	That's a question that really grabbed our guests today. They
1:05.6	wanted a clearer picture of the ideal company and so they went out and looked at two
1:11.6	organizations Park, that's the R&D Division of Xerox, and W.L. Gore and
1:17.4	Associates, that's the material science company best known for Gore-Tex. And what they found is that there are three different
1:25.0	kinds of leaders at these organizations. Those leaders work in conjunction
1:29.9	flexibly, but within a set of prescribed rules. Let's call this nimble leadership
1:36.6	because that's also the title of their HBR article. Our guests are Deborah Ancona. She is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management
1:46.2	and she founded the MIT Leadership Center and Kate Isaacs, she's a research fellow there.
1:51.9	Along with their colleague Elaine Bachman,
1:54.6	they wrote the article that's out now
1:56.7	in the July-August 2019 issue.
1:59.6	Deborah, thanks for coming on the show.
2:01.3	Delighted to be here. And Kate, thanks for being here. Delighted to be here.
	...

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