SMART PEOPLE LEADING SMARTER PEOPLE

       We live in the midst of the worse financial crisis in more than 50 years, and take heart in the decline of oil prices as a sign of the easing of yet another crisis - the "energy crisis". Yet, at a time when new ideas are the only hope for our economic salvation, the real "energy" crisis is to be found in the inability of tired old institutions to produce the innovation and creativity that we so desperately need.
       In fact, today's real energy crisis is represented by our inability to rise to the occasion with new insights and approaches. Despite the enormous pool of talented people that have characterised almost two decades of globalisation, most of these individuals and their ideas continue to be ensnared in organisational cages left over from periods of capital- and labour-intensiveness, designed for command and control, rather than liberation and excellence. The result: great people achieving mediocre results. What an extraordinary waste!
       While the word "talent" is bandied about as if it were an undifferentiated resource, I believe, instead, that all talent issues begin with the individual. We must, therefore, consider the organisational consequences of restoring a degree of individuality to the talent issue. In my recent research on virtuoso teams, we reaffirmed the old adage that real success - and a better world - is more easily achieved by surrounding yourself with people smarter than you and, then, letting them show it. This means accepting a challenging team environment and adopting new leadership practices better suited to an impresario than to a manager. While such a suggestion may seem fanciful, the seriousness of our present situation suggests that such flights of fancy might well be a small price to pay for helping talent contribute to a better world.
       I begin with the belief that real professional talent is precious and should be devoted to living up to its promise, in the pursuit of higher-order societal goals. Leader-aspirants should strive to fulfil this objective, and our work in the virtuoso-team project examined how this could be done.
       Smart people leading smarter people
       Our research focused on a number of great teams that were defined by big, ambitious, personally-risky goals and a relentless search for the absolute best talent, two things that gave them a head-start on "greatness". They then applied leadership approaches that allowed their assembled talent to shine as brightly as the leader had anticipated. Among the leadership practices we observed were:
       Leader as a talent scout
       All of the teams we studied featured a leader who devoted substantial time and energy to identifying potential talent. J Robert Oppenheimer scoured US campuses for the right scientific skills to bring together the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb and pioneered "big science". Miles Davis was always on the lookout for the next "big sound; the next new idea".
       We were amazed by the amount of time team leaders personally devoted to getting the best people obtainable, position by position. In every case, being a "talent scout" was always a central piece of the leadership role.
       Listening rather than telling
       If you assemble all-stars in every position, and pay the premium for doing so, then listening should be a leader's most important activity. We saw this in all our teams. Davis, who revolutionised jazz with different all-star bands in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, was characterised as a world-class listener, despite his reputation for opinionated assertiveness. Only by listening can a team leader understand and appreciate the potential contributions of talented individuals.
       Focus on collaboration and an exchange of ideas, rather than idea-hoarding
       Ideas have value only if they're shared. All of our teams succeeded because they shared rather than protected ideas. This does not mean that there was no competition within the teams; far from it. Thomas Edison, who, as the "Wizard of Menlo Park", was credited with inventing incandescent light, recording sound and adding sound to motion pictures, in reality did it with a team - The Muckers - and built his "invention factory", so that ideas between developers and machinists could move rapidly in both directions.
       In nearly all of our teams, small, cramped quarters promoted intensity, immediacy and full-bandwidth team conversations, ensuring keen awareness among all team members.
       "Fail faster to succeed sooner"
       When facing big risks, taking small ones frequently allows a team to move faster and with a lesser chance of catastrophic failure. The use of "prototypes" is a different way of learning, and all of our teams used experimentation and failure to achieve rapid learning.
       For example, take Leonard Bernstein and his all-star team who created a Broadway revolution with the "West Side Story" project. Dances were deliberately fashioned out of continuously changing modules in order to respond faster to audience reactions.
       Challenge ideas, not the person
       Virtuoso teams thrive on direct and impolite challenges to ideas, without diminishing the individuals. While each all-star team member's potential is accepted as a given, every idea or action is fair game for improvement to the team's benefit. Such tolerance for challenge profoundly changes team dynamics and makes the leadership role much more involving, but the results are worth it. Comic genius Sid Caesar and his virtuoso writing team, which included Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, were challenged to create a new show every week. They wanted every show to be memorable, and their slogan became: Polite teams yield polite results!
       Let individuals soar
       Perhaps in our efforts to be inclusive, we've allowed the "we's" to so dominate the "I's" that we've wound up "just average". If you go to the trouble and expense of finding and recruiting great people, let them be great. Don't bend them to fit the team. General Leslie Groves, who helped the Manhattan Project succeed, adopted the leadership attitude of always asking: "What can I do to make it easier for you to do your job?" Our idea is to put talented individuals in positions where they can be as good as their promise, and then help them to succeed, for all of our benefits.
       We believe that one of the best ways of employing leadership for a better world lies within the ability of talented people to fulfil their ambitions in the pursuit of team, organisational or societal goals. This is not easy to do, and seems to defy currently fashionable, and overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards ambition, elitism and "stardom". Quite the contrary, we are in favour of all of these: being ambitious, allowing justifiable elites to emerge on the basis of superior performance and letting people become stars. We believe that organisations that win in the talent wars do it one individual at a time, and by enabling talented people to fulfil their potential, we increase the likelihood that we all will win.
       William Fischer is a professor of technology management at leading business school IMD International in Lausanne, Switzerland. He addresses this topic in 'Driving Strategic Innovation', a programme he co-directs with Prof Charlie Fine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.