I have a confession忏悔 to make. I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people learn to lead. But recently I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not work when it comes to leading innovation创新. I'm an ethnographer. I use the methods of anthropology人类学 to understand the questions which I'm interested. So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up-close and personal exceptional例外的 leaders of innovation创新. We studied 16 men and women located in seven countries across the globe working in 12 different industries.
In total, we spent hundreds of hours on the ground, on site, watching these leaders in action. We ended up with pages and pages and pages of field notes that we analyzed to look for patterns in what our leaders did. The bottom line, if we want to build organizations that can innovate创新 time and again, we must unlearn our conventional notions of leadership. Leading innovation创新 is not about creating a vision视 and inspiring others to execute实行 it.
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