Cover image for Clever : leading your smartes, most creative people
Title:
Clever : leading your smartes, most creative people
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Physical Description:
xxii, 182 p. : charts ; 24 cm.
ISBN:
9781422122969

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30000010225530 HD53 G63 2009 Open Access Book Advance Management
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Summary

Summary

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.


Author Notes

Rob Goffee is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School.
Gareth Jones is a Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School, and a visiting professor at Institute de Empresa (IE), Madrid. Goffee and Jones are the authors of Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? (Harvard Business Press 2006), and the founding partners of the consulting firm Creative Management Associates.


Reviews 2

Publisher's Weekly Review

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, Nestle 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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


Library Journal Review

Goffee and Jones (London Business Sch.; Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?) outline ways to get the most from your "clever" employees-those who "make a disproportionate contribution" to the organization. Although the book is well organized, describing, e.g., how "clevers" ask difficult questions and are unimpressed by corporate hierarchies, and although it offers suggestions for leading these "clevers," readers may wonder how many "clevers" there truly are, thus just how applicable this title is. An optional choice. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsp. ix
Introductionp. xv
Part 1 Leader and Led
1 Understanding Clever Peoplep. 3
2 What Can Leaders Do?p. 35
Part 2 Clever Teamsp. 67
3 The Anatomy of Clever Teamsp. 67
4 Breaking the Code of Clever Teamsp. 101
Part 3 Clever Organizations
5 Contours of the Clever Organizationp. 121
6 The Future of Clever Organizationsp. 149
Notesp. 169
Indexp. 173
About the Authorsp. 181