Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People

The knowledge economy isn't coming-it's here. Your business and your career increasingly depend on smart ideas dreamed up by smart people. In fact, research shows that a handful of star performers create disproportionate amounts of value for their organizations. They aren't defined by their IQ or their academic credentials. And they aren't "free-agent" types who create value on their own. Rather, they are highly talented, extraordinary thinkers who need their organizations' commercial and financial resources to fulfill their potential.

Leadership and change experts Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones call these invaluable individuals clevers. They can be brilliant, difficult-and sometimes even dangerous. Your organization's competitiveness depends on how well you lead them, but traditional leadership strategies won't be effective. In Clever, Goffee and Jones outline a set of unconventional guidelines for setting up your clevers-and your organization-for success.

Based on extensive research inside international organizations in a wide range of industries, the authors identify common traits clevers share and decode the dynamics of clever teams. Through vivid real-world stories, they reveal the secrets to getting the most from clevers, including:

Tell them what to do-not how to do it

Earn their respect with your expertise-not your job title

Provide "organized space" for their creativity

Sense their needs and keep them motivated.

Shelter them from administrative and political distractions

Connect them with clever peers

Convince them your company can help them succeed

As we move from the knowledge economy to the "clever economy," this provocative and practical bookredefines what it takes to lead your best and brightest effectively.

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, Nestlé 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.)

Rob Goffee is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where he teaches in the world-renowned Senior Executive Programme. Gareth Jones is a Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a visiting professor at INSEAD, the international business school in Fontainebleau, France.