The Working Week 114

How do you create a working environment in which brilliant people can flourish? In many organisations – particularly in knowledge-based fields – a handful of individuals generate disproportionate quantities of value.

It might be the computer game designer who creates a multi-billion dollar winner that bankrolls the entire company for decades, an analyst who spots spending patterns no one else sees or a strategist who anticipates global changes and correctly interprets their business implications.

Companies' competitiveness can hinge on these clever people. But they can be as difficult and fiercely independent as they are clever. So how do you manage them – particularly when you're not likely to be as clever as they are?

That's the question Rob Goffee, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School asks in a new book, Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People, written with Gareth Jones, visiting Professor at INSEAD.

As Rob explains to Wayne this week, leading clever people can be enormously challenging, yet doing so effectively can be the key to an organisation's sustained success.

Unlike conventional management, the challenge with these exceptional individuals isn't one of motivation. Far from it. It is how you inspire them to achieve their highest potential - which means making the organisation valuable to the individual. It's a question of orchestrating, not commanding.

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