HBR On Leadership

Today’s leaders need to be able to innovate over and over again despite fast-changing market conditions and a multitude of other uncertainities. Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill has spent years researching the true drivers of innovation, taking lessons from the world's most successful leaders and companies. She explains why leading innovation requires a different set of leadership skills including the need to shift from a 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.

Since 2023, HBR On Leadership has been bringing you hand-curated insights and inspiration from across the HBR archive to unlock the best in those around you. But the time has come for HBR On Leadership to hit pause on new episodes. While this feed is going on hiatus, you can hear new, weekly conversations spanning leadership, strategy, innovation and much more on our flagship show, the HBR IdeaCast. And the best way to stay on top of everything you need to lead is to subscribe to HBR, for access to our full archive, exclusive subscriber content, events, new audio offerings, and tools to put the best management ideas to work for you.

When it comes to solving complex, layered problems, the default for many organizational leaders is to take their time to work through the issues at hand. Unfortunately, that often leads to problems that linger with no clear resolution. Instead, Anne Morriss offers a different problem-solving framework based on speed, momentum, and trust. Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of the Leadership Consortium. With Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, she authored the book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems.

There are many productivity tools and tactics that promise to help you make the most of your workday. But there is one simple practice that’s consistently been shown to be effective: timeboxing. Timeboxing is about merging your to-do list with your calendar, reserving time each day for each task you want to get done, and then truly focusing on that one thing at a time. The return on merging your to-do list with your calendar is higher productivity, better collaboration, and less distraction, explains entrepreneur and author Marc Zao-Sanders. He shares how to try the method yourself and how your team and organization can also benefit from it. Zao-Sanders is the author of the book Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time.

We all know the stereotypes of leaders who use charisma, manipulation, domineering behavior, or their status in the hierarchy to exert control. But there is another type of leader whose power isn’t necessarily related to their position on the org chart. Chris Lipp has spent years studying people who’ve developed this “personal power” that is rooted in their internal values. Lipp is a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, an executive coach, and the author of the book The Science of Personal Power. He’s investigated where this second type of power comes from and how to tap into it using some simple strategies and tools.