Clever
Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
If your company is like most, it has a handful of people who generate disproportionate quantities of value: A researcher creates products that bankroll the entire organization for decades. A manager spots consumer-spending patterns no one else sees and defines new market categories your enterprise can serve. A strategist anticipates global changes and correctly interprets their business implications.
Companies' competitiveness, even survival, increasingly hinge on such "clever people." But the truth is, clever people are as fiercely independent as they are clever-they don't want to be led. So how do you corral these players in your organization and inspire them to achieve their highest potential?
In Clever, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones offer potent insights drawn from their extensive research. The authors explain how to:
-Identify your clever people and their motivations
-Shelter your "clevers" from political distractions that can inhibit their productivity
-Help clevers generate even more value by creating clever teams
-Manage the unique tensions that can arise when clevers work together
Leading clever people can be enormously challenging, yet doing so effectively is the key to your organization's sustained success. Lively and engaging, this book provides the ideas, practices, and examples you need to create an environment where your most brilliant people can flourish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
They tend to obsess over work projects, don't like to be told what to do and need lots of space. They are video-game designer Will Wright, iMac creator Jonathan Ive and Louis Vuitton brand rejuvenator Marc Jacobs. They are the "clevers," the "highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them." Goffee and Jones, professors at the London School of Business, present a smart and surprisingly entertaining manual on identifying and handling these employees for optimum benefit, complete with a dos and don'ts chart. They advocate building a corporate culture catering to these individuals following the lead of Cisco Systems, Nestl and Google and argue that the stagnant economy demands creative approaches to inspire productivity: the particular skills of exceptionally gifted workers can be harnessed by entire businesses, creating clever teams and corporations. The book is balanced in its treatment and also explores the flip side of cleverness, making the important caveat: "the clever economy is not a utopian capitalist idyll," in its illustration of how unchecked and glamorized cleverness contributed to Wall Street's implosion.
