The New Leadership Structures that Unblock Innovation

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

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

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ability of an organization to innovate over and over again, for the long term, depends on leadership structure, culture, and systems. That's according to Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, who has spent years researching the true drivers of innovation, taking lessons from the world's most successful companies. She explains why today's leaders need to shift from the focus on decision-making and producing to creating the conditions for collaboration, experimentation, and smart decision-making across teams, silos, and wider ecosystems. She shares examples from Mastercard, Pixar, and more and outlines some newly defined ways of looking at leadership roles: as Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts. Hill's new book is Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A new digital reading experience from Harvard Business Review is here.
0:05.0	It's the HBR Interactive Issue.
0:07.0	Swipe through pages, search each issue, and listen to articles with audio narration.
0:12.0	The interactive issue is available now to all HBR Print Magazine subscribers.
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0:19.0	Subscribe today at HBR.org slash interactive issue.
0:37.3	I'm Adi Ignatius.
0:38.7	I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
0:46.0	All right, Allison,
0:50.4	so every organization wants to innovate, right?
0:52.7	Not just once, but over and over again.
0:55.4	And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this, right?
1:00.9	They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough, am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders?
1:06.9	When actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action.
1:15.8	Yeah, I think we know from research that a lot of the best innovation comes from the front lines as well as R&D departments.
1:22.4	But then how do you harness those ideas, create effective experiments, and ultimately scale the ones that work. And if you're a
1:29.1	leader, how are you overseeing all of these disparate efforts and then prioritizing the ones
1:33.9	in which you really want to invest? So today's guest has been drawing the playbook for innovation
1:38.8	for much of her career. Linda Hill, professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book
1:43.2	Collective Genius about a decade ago and has just published a new one, Genius at Harvard Business School, wrote the book Collective Genius about a decade ago,
1:45.5	and has just published a new one, Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation.
1:50.7	She's going to explain how to create a system and build a team that can innovate and then cascade
	...

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