In the Media

What makes a great leader?

by

Leaders of the future must master 3 key roles to drive impact and innovation: architect, bridger, and catalyst

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Paradox Strategies Founding Partner Linda Hill (with Emily Tedards, Jason Wild, and Karl Weber) describes how great leaders of the future must master 3 key roles – architect, bridger, and catalyst – to drive innovation and impact.

As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation.

As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create.

And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems.

These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation.
Read the full article on HBR

Harvard Business Review chooses articles by Paradox Strategies authors for exclusive book collections

by

Writing by Linda Hill and Taran Swan featured in 'HBR at 100' and 'HBR's 10 Must Reads 2023'

Articles by Linda Hill and Taran Swan are featured in 'HBR at 100' and 'HBR's 10 Must Reads 2023'

Two articles by Paradox Strategies authors have been selected for inclusion in exclusive book collections by Harvard Business Review.

In a book released earlier this summer, HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review’s First Century, editors celebrated the publication’s 100th anniversary with a commemorative volume of what they are calling the most influential voices on innovative topics since its inception. Linda Hill’s 2007 HBR article, Becoming the Boss, about becoming a first-time manager, was selected as among “the most definitive management ideas in a century.”

For decades, Linda has studied how star performers transition into management. “The shelves are lined with books describing effective and successful leaders. But very few address the challenges of learning to lead, especially for the first-time manager,” she notes. This article represents the culmination of her decades of research and case studies that have since fueled leadership development initiatives designed to make that difficult transition much easier. It was also an important precursor to her definitive management book, Being the Boss.

In a second book collection, an article by Paradox Strategies’ Linda Hill and Taran Swan with Harvard Business School research associate Emily Tedards has been selected for the highly curated upcoming publication of HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2023: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – coming in October.

The article, Drive Innovation with Better Decision-Making, featured in HBR’s November-December 2021 edition, provides best practices for decision-making drawing on the story of the transformation at Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply, which would go on to play a critical role supporting the rapid development of the pharma giant’s Covid vaccine.

One of HBR’s 10 must reads 2023: Drive innovation with better decision-making

by

Photo of a lightbulb by Diego PH on Unsplash

***This article has been selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2023: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – coming in October!***

Don’t let old habits undermine your organization’s creativity.
By Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan
in Harvard Business Review

Despite their embrace of agile methods, many firms striving to innovate are struggling to produce breakthrough ideas. A key culprit is an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making.

Today’s discovery-driven innovation processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, from which ideas to pursue to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, and so on. But these choices are often made too slowly and informed by obsolete information and narrow perspectives.

To align their decision-making processes with agile approaches, businesses need to include diverse points of view, clarify decision rights, match the cadence of decisions to the pace of learning, and encourage candid conflict in service of a better experience for the end customer. Only then will all that rapid experimentation pay off.

In the November-December 2021 edition of Harvard Business Review, co-authors Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swan suggest best practices for these interventions, drawing on the story of the transformation at Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply, which would go on to play a critical role supporting the rapid development of the pharma giant’s Covid vaccine.

Read the full article at HBR

About the authors

  • Linda A. Hill is a founding partner at Paradox Strategies and the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is author of Becoming a Manager and coauthor of Being the Boss and Collective Genius.
  • Emily Tedards is a research associate at Harvard Business School.
  • Taran Swan is a managing partner at Paradox Strategies.

CONTACT US

© Copyright 2016-2024 Paradox Strategies. All Rights Reserved.