GeoreveBusinessGist

To Get More Creative, Become Less Productive

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">
<img src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/11/nov15-30-128103546-850x478.jpg" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "garamond" , "baskerville" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">There
 is a fundamental tension between productivity and creativity, and 
managers won’t get more of the latter until they recognize it.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, baskerville, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">Productive
 people move through the tasks they have to accomplish in a systematic 
way. They make steady and measurable progress toward their goals. They 
make effective and efficient use of their time.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, baskerville, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">Creativity… doesn’t.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, baskerville, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">Creativity
 needs time and space to grow. Although we can systematically engage in 
activities that are related to creativity, it is hard to systematize 
creativity itself. In particular, creativity is fundamentally about 
knowledge. Nearly all creative ideas involve people finding new uses for
 existing knowledge – some novel configuration of old insights. James 
Dyson developed his vacuum by drawing a parallel to sawmills. Fiona 
Fairhurst designed a faster swimsuit by understanding shark skin. George
 de Mestral invented Velcro by understanding cockleburs.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, baskerville, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">That
 means people need to have the time to learn things that are not 
obviously relevant to their jobs, so that they will have a broad and 
deep knowledge base to draw from when they need to be creative.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, baskerville, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.9; text-align: justify;">Moreover,
 creative enterprises rarely involve steady and measurable progress. 
Instead, being creative involves trying lots of different possibilities,
 struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right solution.</span><br />
<div style="background: white; border-top: solid #D5D7D8 1.0pt; border: none; mso-border-top-alt: solid #D5D7D8 .75pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0in 0in 0in 0in;">

<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: none; padding: 0in;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif; font-size: 7.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://hbr.org/topic/creativity"><span style="color: #222222; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Thinking
Creatively</span></a></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: none; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; padding: 0in;">
<span style="color: #888888; font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How to build this critical skill.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: none; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; padding: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: none; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; padding: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But these activities — building
up a knowledge base and exploring it — take time. It is hard to simply schedule
a few hours here and there to engage in creative pursuits. Instead, there are
times when it’s necessary to spend hours learning about a new area of
knowledge, or to have a rambling conversation with a colleague to pull the
thread of a new idea. And so a lot of creative activity may look suspiciously
like loafing around until the breakthrough comes.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Helvetica",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This difference between
productivity and creativity is a central reason why many companies want more
creativity from their employees than they get.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Companies typically evaluate
employees based on measures of productivity. More importantly, they set up
their hiring plans based on the assumption that they are going to hire
productive people. They want the people in the organization to make clear
progress. And they focus on developing conscientious individuals who finish
tasks.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If an organization truly wants
creativity, it has to start by hiring more people than it needs just to
complete the tasks required for the company to stay afloat. Much has been made
of <a href="https://hbr.org/2013/08/just-how-valuable-is-googles-2-1"><span style="color: #0787b1; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Google’s 20%
time</span></a>, in which employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time
on new ideas. While there has been some discussion about how this policy has
actually been implemented in the company, I think it is correct that you need
to hire 10-20% more people than you actually need to complete jobs if you are
going to give everyone an opportunity to develop their creative skills.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Managers also need to provide
some flexibility for employees to alter their schedules when an interesting new
idea begins to develop. Giving someone the freedom to use 10-20% of their time
to develop their creativity does not necessarily mean that they will spend 4-8
hours each week on creative pursuits. Instead, there may be weeks in which
someone focuses exclusively on tasks they need to complete and has other weeks
in which several days involve pursuing an idea down a rabbit hole.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But it’s not enough just to give
employees the time and flexibility they need to be creative. Managers have to
reward employees for engaging in tasks that may ultimately lead to creative
solutions, like learning new things, developing new skills, having wide-ranging
conversations with colleagues, and trying out ideas that don’t work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is possible to manage in a way
that promotes creativity, but it will require productivity-obsessed managers to
loosen their grip on the way people spend their time at work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">

</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://hbr.org/search?term=art+markman"><span style="color: #c82502; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Art Markman</span></a>, PhD, is the
Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the
University of Texas at Austin and founding director of the program in the <a href="http://hdo.utexas.edu/"><span style="color: #c82502; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Human Dimensions of Organizations</span></a>. He has
written over 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision
making, and motivation. He is the author of several books including <a href="http://www.smartthinkingbook.com/"><i><span style="color: #c82502; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Smart Thinking</span></i></a>, <i>Smart
Change</i>, and <i>Habits of Leadership</i>.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">

</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
article is about <span style="color: #c82502; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; text-underline: none;"><a href="https://hbr.org/topic/creativity">CREATIVITY</a> </span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #c82502; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; text-underline: none;">an except from hbs</span></span></b></div>
</div>
</div>
</article></div>

To Get More Creative, Become Less Productive

There is a fundamental tension between productivity and creativity, and managers won’t get more of the latter until they recog...

The CEO’s Second Act

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="article article-first-row premium ">
     <img alt="" src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2007/01/OCT15_01_200024490-001-383x215.jpg" />The C-suite has become the hot seat. With CEOs under enormous 
pressure to deliver the outstanding performance investors demand—and to 
satisfy other, often conflicting constituencies—it is no wonder that the
 pace of CEO turnover is accelerating. The latest Booz Allen Hamilton 
CEO succession study found that 15.3% of CEOs worldwide and 16.2% in 
North America left office in 2005. That’s an increase since 1995 of 70% 
globally and 54% in North America. What’s more, a third of the 
departures in the most recent survey were “nonroutine”—that is, they 
occurred before the scheduled succession date, usually because of 
performance problems.<br />

Typically, the early departure of a CEO leads to the recruitment of 
someone thought to be better equipped to fix what the last CEO couldn’t,
 or wouldn’t. The new leader arrives with a mandate to change course or,
 in the most extreme circumstances, to save a sinking ship. The board 
places its confidence in him because of the present dilemma’s similarity
 to some previous challenge he dealt with successfully, such as 
reshuffling a portfolio, slashing costs, increasing market share, or 
negotiating with regulators.<br />

Facing a familiar problem, the CEO can be expected to do what he was 
hired to do. Indeed, research presented in “Are Leaders Portable?” by 
Boris Groysberg, Andrew N. McLean, and Nitin Nohria (HBR May 2006), 
indicates that leaders succeed when the skills demanded in their new 
positions directly draw upon the executives’ professional backgrounds 
and experiences. But familiar problems are inevitably succeeded by less 
familiar ones, for which the specially selected CEO is not quite so 
qualified. More often than not, the experiences, skills, and temperament
 that yielded triumph in Act I turn out to be unequal to Act II’s 
difficulties. In fact, the approaches that worked so brilliantly in Act I
 may be the very opposite of what is needed to bring Act II to a happy 
resolution. <br />

<div class="article-callout">
 <div class="callout-contents">
  The approaches that worked so brilliantly for a CEO in Act I may be
 the very opposite of what is needed to bring Act II to a happy 
resolution.<br />
 
 </div>
</div>
As the drama unfolds, the CEO has four choices: He can refuse to 
change, in which case he will be replaced; he can realize that the next 
act requires new skills and learn them; he can downsize or circumscribe 
his role to compensate for his deficiencies; or he can line up a 
successor who is qualified to fill a role to which the incumbent’s 
skills and interests are no longer suited. Hewlett-Packard’s Carly 
Fiorina exemplifies the first alternative; Merrill Lynch’s Stanley 
O’Neal the second; Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page the third; and 
Quest Diagnostics’ Ken Freeman the fourth. All but the first option are 
reasonable responses to the challenges presented in the second acts of 
most CEOs’ tenures. And all but the first require a power of 
observation, a propensity for introspection, and a strain of humility 
that are, in truth, quite rare in the ranks of the very people who need 
those qualities most.<br />

<h2>
Act II’s Four Variations</h2>
<h3>
Remake your company into one that has no place for you.</h3>
Carly Fiorina is a perfect example of a CEO brought in to address a 
specific set of problems because of her success in dealing with similar 
ones elsewhere. Hewlett-Packard’s board began searching for a new CEO 
because the company had become stodgy, inbred, bureaucratic, 
uncompetitive, and demoralized. HP’s last groundbreaking innovation, the
 ink-jet printer, had been introduced 15 years earlier, in 1984, and 
quarterly growth was almost nonexistent. Competitors threatened to 
encroach on every segment of HP’s business—Dell in PCs, Lexmark in 
printers, Sun Microsystems in servers, and IBM in solutions. So the 
board sought a dynamic, first-class communicator who could revive 
morale, restart the innovation engine, cut through the bureaucracy, and 
justify the reputation on which HP had been undeservedly resting for too
 long.<br />

Fiorina filled the bill. Having been president of Lucent’s Global 
Service Provider Business, she had done these things before. She set out
 to market her vision for HP by making speeches and appearances at 
high-profile events such as the World Economic Forum, courting media 
attention, meeting with endless groups of HP managers, and, perhaps most
 dramatically, becoming the public face of the company by appearing in 
its commercials and other advertising. Contributing to her personal 
mystique and sharpening HP’s image was her distinction as the first 
woman to lead such a large, well-known company.<br />

As outsized as her image were the steps she took to recast the 
organization. She laid off thousands of people and consolidated well 
over a hundred product groups into about a dozen to reduce redundancies 
and speed decision making. But only a major acquisition, she concluded, 
could disrupt entrenched routines and catapult HP into a commanding lead
 in the personal computer industry. To accomplish this, she was forced 
to override a boardroom minority that objected to a merger with Compaq, 
and she ignored those who pointed out that mergers of large companies in
 the high-tech arena had never worked out.<br />

Today, even her detractors admit that the Compaq acquisition made 
sense. Despite boardroom tensions that exploded into a spying scandal, 
HP is now enjoying a growing lead over its competitors, including what 
was supposed to be an unstoppable Dell. But integrating two 
organizations and boosting operating performance in the core businesses 
require very different skills from developing a vision, embodying it, 
communicating it, and driving it through—Fiorina’s proven strengths. Her
 continued public exposure, even after the battle was won, led to 
accusations that she was an incorrigible publicity hound. In the end, 
her reluctance to delegate led to conflict with the board, which lost 
confidence in her. 
  <br />

<h4 class="sidebar-title">
Implications for the Board</h4>
<div class="sidebar-contents height--collapse">
  The near inevitability that a new CEO will face an Act II that puts
 his or her skills and assumptions to a severe test places special 
responsibility in the hands of boards of directors. This advice is 
addressed to them. <br />
 
  <ul>
<li>In succession and selection, beware of stylized leaders or 
one-trick ponies who seem to have succeeded in one kind of situation but
 have had limited exposure to a range of leadership challenges. Look for
 evidence that the individual has developed or could adopt more than one
 leadership approach.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Pay attention to the possible leading indicators of CEO 
ineffectiveness, such as failure to deliver on promises, excessive 
rationalization of failures, departures of valued executives, or the 
CEO’s seeming out of touch with his organization or even his own team. 
Often, a CEO’s inability to adjust to a new set of issues reveals itself
 only when problems become acute. By then, it may be too late to do 
anything other than remove him. The board should collect data with an 
eye toward determining the CEO’s ongoing effectiveness. The board’s 
sense of his progress should be shared with the CEO and the company’s 
other leaders.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Recognize that the board has a role to play in mentoring and 
coaching the CEO. Too often, the board takes a hands-off approach until 
it becomes apparent that the CEO is faltering.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>When faced with a crisis, recognize that you may need to think 
about a two-stage succession process. Consider bringing in a CEO 
specifically to handle the immediate problems. Make clear that once the 
crisis has been resolved, you may look for another CEO, one who is 
better suited to dealing with the next round of issues.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="sidebar-fade">
 </div>
<div class="sidebar-expand">
 Read more</div>
<h3>
Remake your company—then yourself.</h3>
In 2003, Stan O’Neal was engaged in deep reflection. He was finishing
 his first year as the CEO of Merrill Lynch, and, despite his tremendous
 success, he sensed it was time for a change.<br />

Two years earlier, in July 2001, he had been named president of the 
company. Six weeks later, he was managing in command-and-control mode, 
regrouping the firm after the terrorist attacks of September 11, which 
killed three employees and forced the company to evacuate its heavily 
damaged headquarters. Additionally, Merrill Lynch was still feeling the 
effects of the bursting of the tech bubble a year earlier (and it would 
soon be hit with a wave of negative headlines about the Wall Street 
research scandal). The challenges required immediate action; O’Neal made
 painful and unpopular decisions that would be criticized by some within
 Merrill Lynch and second-guessed from the sidelines.<br />

Between 2001 and 2003, O’Neal worked hard to resize and reshape the 
firm, cutting costs to cope with lower revenue, reengineering parts of 
the business to diversify revenue streams and neutralize the 
roller-coaster highs and lows of debt and equity trading, and reining in
 expansion plans that had failed to deliver.<br />

<div class="promo--right">
 <div class="advertising">
  <div id="DFP_IC_pos3">
   
  </div>
</div>
</div>
O’Neal often found himself in a lonely position: He knew he had to 
rethink the firm’s entire business model and challenge the “Mother 
Merrill” culture that had become more maternalistic than performance 
based. At the same time, he had to improve the morale of a shaken 
workforce and retain the attributes of the iconic franchise he had 
inherited.<br />

By the summer of 2003, O’Neal’s efforts had paid off, with Merrill 
Lynch posting the best first-half results in its nearly century-long 
history. With the firm on solid ground, he began to think longer term 
about what he would need to do to ensure that Merrill’s future leaders 
would not have to face similar problems. He realized that new challenges
 would require Merrill’s executives, himself included, to provide a 
substantially new kind of leadership. In other words, he understood the 
need to make a major shift in leadership skills in Act II, even though 
Act I had been a great success.<br />

Working with an outside consultant and his senior management team, he
 led a process of feedback and coaching. Together they created the 
Merrill Lynch Leadership Model to clarify what they expected of 
themselves and other leaders at the firm. The model focuses on four 
areas critical to effective leadership: strategic thinking, business 
results, people leadership, and personal effectiveness.<br />

The top 11 leaders (including O’Neal), followed by the next 200, then
 the next 1,000, received feedback and coaching. Changes were made in 
performance evaluation, rewards, talent reviews, and other mechanisms to
 support the new model of leadership. By 2006, objective measures 
revealed that Merrill’s culture, which had been homogeneous, lenient, 
and clubby, had shifted significantly, becoming merit based, rigorous, 
and diverse.<br />

<h3>
Respect your limitations while growing your company.</h3>
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google when they were PhD 
candidates at Stanford. The uniquely effective Internet search engine 
they invented enabled their company to be one of the few healthy 
survivors of the dot-com crash. As their background might suggest, the 
founders’ strong suit is writing computer code. But their ambitions for 
Google go well beyond spurring technical refinements of its core 
technology. Google now offers satellite mapping, digitalized libraries, 
and its own e-mail service, and its search capabilities extend to e-mail
 databases and company intranets. Although Page and Brin were committed 
to staying with the company they created, they knew they weren’t 
professional managers or marketers or masters of strategy. So in 2001 
they brought in a “grown-up,” Eric Schmidt, to operate the company. 
  <br />

Schmidt had been the chairman and CEO of Novell for four years, and 
before that he was the chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, 
where he led the development of Java. He is a skilled big-company 
executive, a seasoned marketer, and a renowned technology expert in his 
own right. With Schmidt as CEO, Page as president for products, and Brin
 as president for technology, the company has flourished beyond almost 
anyone’s expectations. Indeed, Google provides one of the few examples 
of technology-oriented founders making a smooth handoff to a 
professional manager.<br />

<h3>
Remake your company, then move on.</h3>
In 1995, Ken Freeman was named chairman and CEO of Corning Clinical 
Labs, the ailing medical testing business soon to be spun off from 
Corning. Freeman had been a Corning “lifer,” having risen through the 
financial side to become controller while still in his early forties. He
 then moved through a variety of roles, among them running the company’s
 television-glass business and serving as CFO.<br />

Freeman found a business in shambles. Receivables sat on the books 
interminably; cash flow was plummeting at an alarming pace. Questionable
 lab results and billing practices had made the company (along with 
others in the industry) a target of government investigations. Freeman’s
 drastic mandate was not to rescue the business but to get it ready to 
be sold. However, the troubles were so pronounced that no credible buyer
 stepped forward, and Corning was forced to adopt a Plan B: a spin-off 
of the clinical labs as an independent public company with Freeman as 
its chairman and CEO.<br />

Freeman made clear to his management team that billing practices that
 were common in the testing industry threatened the business’s survival.
 He quickly installed a rigorous quality process, assembled a new board,
 and generally pulled the company together. Having created stability, he
 embarked on an expansion program that culminated in the acquisition of 
the lab’s largest competitor, SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories. 
When the dust settled, the now renamed Quest Diagnostics was the 
industry leader in size, geographic reach, market share, and quality. 
Its stock price soared. Then, in 1999, with Quest still gathering 
momentum, Freeman went out to find a successor and worked with the board
 to put in place an orderly succession process. In 2003, at the still 
youthful age of 53, Freeman passed the baton to Surya Mohapatra and left
 the company he had built.<br />

Why, unlike Fiorina, did Freeman leave before he had to, when in fact
 the board, investors, and employees wanted him to stay? Reflecting on 
his decision later, Freeman observed that the company’s future growth 
would have to be organic (for one thing, Freeman had exhausted the 
supply of major acquisition targets). A deep understanding of medical 
technology, which Mohapatra possessed and Freeman lacked, was going to 
be a more crucial qualification for leading Quest than a flair for 
turnaround situations or a gift for deal making, Freeman realized.<br />

But if so, why didn’t Freeman, like O’Neal, decide to turn himself 
into the kind of executive Quest required? The difference was that 
Freeman felt most alive in the high-pressure situations of crisis and 
M&A. Gently moving the tiller from side to side after he had 
prevented the vessel from capsizing was Freeman’s idea of boredom. Being
 not only an effective executive but a wise one, he didn’t invent or 
precipitate crises or make ill-considered acquisitions simply to keep 
himself engaged. Instead he went looking for a new arena where he could 
find excitement and success. Today he is with KKR, engineering 
turnarounds at companies such as Masonite International.<br />

<h2>
The Obstacles to Coping</h2>
CEOs often face enormous challenges in their first months on the job.
 In her Act I, Fiorina had to symbolize leadership, as well as lead 
effectively, in order to achieve the transformation she sought. In his, 
O’Neal had to be almost inhumanly tough to shatter the culture that was 
impeding Merrill’s progress. In theirs, Brin and Page had to devise the 
algorithms that would produce the most germane search results on the 
Internet. And in his, Freeman had to envision a company that in no way 
resembled the existing one.<br />

Each of these executives performed brilliantly, as do many other CEOs
 who are brought in to fix specific problems. But as predictably as in a
 play of Shakespeare’s, a successful CEO’s Act I will end, and a second 
act will begin, sometimes imperceptibly. It usually happens before the 
first two years are up. (Of course, there are plenty of chief executives
 who are unsuited to solving the problems they were hired to overcome 
and who fail within the first year and a half; see the article “When 
CEOs Step Up to Fail,” by Jay A. Conger and David A. Nadler, in the 
Spring 2004 issue of <em>Sloan Management Review</em>.) A career-testing ordeal arose after two years in O’Neal’s case, three years in Page and Brin’s, and five years in Fiorina’s. 
  <br />

<div class="promo--right">
 <div class="advertising">
  <div id="DFP_IC_pos4">
   
  </div>
</div>
</div>
Why do so many high performers—not just those mentioned here but 
hundreds of others too—meet their end when Act II begins? There are 
several reasons. First, some CEOs are simply oblivious to the shift in 
its early stages. The extraordinary commitment they must make to solving
 the first set of problems, and their tendency to attack those aspects 
most likely to yield to their proven methods, somehow blind them to less
 familiar realities, as well as to the new leadership approaches that 
are required. Second, some CEOs sense the shift but fail to understand 
how much damage they can cause by sticking to their original approaches.
 CEOs are notoriously poor observers of their own behavior, and they 
rarely notice its unintended consequences or invite feedback. Third, 
some recognize the new circumstances and thus the need for a change in 
their modes of leadership but are incapable of transforming themselves 
enough to make a difference. Finally, some don’t change in Act II 
because they don’t want to. Freeman may have been capable of leading 
differently in Quest’s next phase—he certainly understood the need to do
 so—but making that transformation had little appeal for him. <br />

<div class="article-callout">
 <div class="callout-contents">
  Some CEOs sense the shift to Act II but fail to understand how much
 damage they can cause by sticking to their original approaches.<br />
 
 </div>
</div>
Leadership style is a function of years of development and 
experiences, and it is an outgrowth of personality and character. 
Achieving a dramatic change in leadership style is difficult for anyone,
 but it’s particularly hard for people in their fifth or sixth decade 
who have been responsible for a long string of successes. Personality 
and character aside, such people have developed systems for leading, so 
to speak, that they can’t bring themselves to jettison. In fact, when 
faced with resistance during Act II to their customary modes of acting, 
some leaders hang on more tightly than ever to the devices that have 
long kept them afloat.<br />

Another way of looking at this phenomenon is that these leaders’ 
well-worn management techniques have become inseparable from their 
prevailing view of themselves. In a series of landmark studies, 
organizational psychologist Joseph L. Moses observed the different ways 
in which managers deal with emerging and unfamiliar challenges. 
“Stylized” leaders, as he called them, cling to old and discredited 
approaches that have become part of their identities as executives. 
These leaders believe that if they were to feel their way by trial and 
error to a new set of responses, they would sacrifice the skills and 
personal qualities that gave them their successes and reputations. 
“Adaptive” leaders, by contrast, spend time understanding the situations
 confronting them and contrive strategies and approaches that fit the 
circumstances. Stylized managers can be extremely effective until they 
encounter a situation that is too dissimilar to its predecessors to 
yield to the proven approach. Not surprisingly, Moses found adaptive 
managers to be more effective overall in a range of different 
situations.<br />

Psychology and learned behavior, reinforced by experience, are only 
half the story, however. The limitations in executives’ cognitive 
abilities also have a role to play in CEOs’ Act II reversals. A 
longitudinal study published by Andrew D. Henderson, Danny Miller, and 
Donald C. Hambrick in May 2006 compared the tenures of 98 CEOs in 
branded foods, an industry that the researchers describe as 
comparatively stable, with 228 CEOs in computers. The food companies’ 
performance tended to improve over the course of the CEO’s tenure; in 
computers, performance tended to peak early and diminish steadily 
thereafter. The authors’ hypothesis is that every CEO comes to the job 
with a “relatively fixed” approach—a view of the world and a matching 
set of skills. The more dynamic the business environment, the faster 
those worldviews and abilities become mismatched to present realities, 
both competitive and organizational, and “it will be the rare executive 
who can greatly transform his or her mind-set, aptitudes, and skills.”<br />

As the researchers suggest, a senior executive who has built her 
career on being the most effective mass producer of the lowest-cost 
products would find it extremely difficult to adopt a strategy based on 
providing luxury offerings. She would be hampered by her mental habits, 
her values, her understanding of and interest in particular kinds of 
customers, and her entrenched notions of what works. Executives in the 
publishing industry are experiencing those pains right now. Despite 
their grand visions of migrating content from print to digital 
platforms, the majority of longtime print executives are finding it 
difficult to make the wrenching decisions required to facilitate the 
transition.<br />

Companies that successfully identify and develop talent recognize 
that stylized and otherwise limited managers can be effective if matched
 to the right situations. They also recognize that people often need to 
be moved laterally when situations change or when it becomes clear that 
an executive has been put in the wrong position. But there is no lateral
 position in the company to which a CEO can be moved. When a chief 
executive is inflexible or unable to see a change in circumstances, the 
board must take actions that are inherently unpleasant and disruptive.<br />

<h2>
Four Steps to Renewal</h2>
Despite the personal and professional limitations that affect 
executives’ ability to adapt, there are steps executives can take to 
discern that they have entered new territory and to respond accordingly.
 Here are the four essential ones.<br />

<h3>
Recognition.</h3>
Evidence that your leadership style and approach are no longer 
working can take several forms. You may notice that people aren’t 
responding as they once did to your speeches, especially those in which 
you lay out your vision for the next two or three or five years, and 
that your initiatives are faltering. You may also find yourself clashing
 with your team or with your board. You may start to feel fatigued and 
emotionally disengaged from your work, which has started to seem like a 
job rather than a calling. While none of the above by itself would be 
proof positive that the ground has shifted, an accumulation of these 
factors would be strongly indicative. 
  <br />

<h3>
Acceptance.</h3>
For a successful, confident, and assertive leader, it is tempting to 
see failure as the result of others’ negligence or mistakes and to 
believe that poor performance merely calls for redoubled courage and 
persistence. But such beliefs are often self-deceiving and even 
delusional. It is therefore important that leaders rely on more than 
just their own impressions. Advice can come from a variety of sources: 
the full board, selected directors, or, as in O’Neal’s case, outside 
consultants.<br />

<h3>
Analysis and understanding.</h3>
Once you recognize that Act II has arrived and that it requires a new
 type of leadership, the next step is to understand the nature of the 
shift. What would an Act II of your own making look like, and what are 
its implications for your leadership approach? An objective evaluation 
is often beneficial.<br />

<h3>
Decision and action.</h3>
I’ve seen CEOs employ a number of different strategies at this stage:<br />

<h4>
Personal change.</h4>
In some cases, the CEO is able to step back, understand the 
requirements of Act II, and adjust his approach accordingly, as Stan 
O’Neal did. However, this modest-sounding goal requires a rare ability 
to reflect on one’s own behavior and a willingness to reveal one’s 
weaknesses and admit shortcomings. Then the leader must take on the task
 of self-transformation with all the determination and tenacity he 
formerly directed at pushing the organization forward. A CEO who can do 
that will no longer be the captive of strategies that have outlived 
their usefulness.<br />

<h4>
Structural change.</h4>
Page and Brin’s handoff to Schmidt can be seen as a classic case of 
redesigning the management structure to complement the strengths of the 
top people. Hewlett-Packard’s board appears to have attempted the same 
thing with Fiorina. The board recognized the need for a change in 
leadership style and initially proposed not to remove Fiorina but to put
 in place a structure that would devolve some of her duties to 
subordinates better suited to overseeing day-to-day management. Fiorina,
 by most reports, rejected this approach, asserting that her own 
leadership style was best suited to institutionalizing the changes she 
had initiated.<br />

<h4>
Accelerated succession.</h4>
Finally, a leader can acknowledge that the shift has begun and that 
it will call for a different chief executive. Such a decision requires a
 high degree of self- and situational awareness. Many CEOs suffer from a
 misplaced sense of obligation to stick it out and complete the mission,
 even when signs are plentiful that hanging around would actually 
imperil it. Frankly, in 30 years of working with CEOs, I’ve hardly ever 
come across an occasion in which people thought the CEO had chosen to 
leave prematurely. The consensus is usually that the CEO has stuck 
around too long.<span class="contextbreak">• • •</span><br />

A smart board and a thorough search process will often turn up the 
right person to solve the company’s immediate problems. But today’s 
marketplace, in which buying patterns can suddenly shift and new 
technologies can materialize out of nowhere, will surely test a new CEO 
before long. Removing a maladaptive CEO before his time is messy and 
traumatizing for all concerned, including the ranks of employees. 
Consequently, boards have a duty to choose and cultivate leaders who can
 negotiate the transition from the first act to the second and, for that
 matter, from the second to the third, and so on. Moreover, boards can 
make sure that up-and-coming executives develop an awareness of, and 
receive training for, Act II transitions, so that if and when the 
individuals get to the C-suite, they are potentially more adaptive. 
Boards can do this by seeing to it that promising executives rotate 
through various locations, functions, and businesses; after all, 
divisions and subsidiaries present their top managers with Act IIs that 
are similar to, if less wrenching than, the crises that face corporate 
CEOs.<br />

Such an approach expresses the ideal. In reality, there’s a scarcity 
of CEOs who can repeatedly refashion themselves. The board therefore 
must respect the limitations of the mere mortal who has served the 
company well, if only for a few years. By the same token, proud CEOs 
must come to recognize when their time has passed. 
 <br />

<div class="mvm description-text hbrgray, line-height-tight">
A version of this article appeared in the <a href="https://hbr.org/archive-toc/BR0701">January 2007</a> issue of <em>Harvard Business Review</em>.</div>
</div>
</div>

The CEO’s Second Act

The C-suite has become the hot seat. With CEOs under enormous pressure to deliver the outstanding performance investors demand—and t...

How Leaders Create and Use Networks

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="article article-first-row premium ">
     <div>
 
 <img alt="dec15-03-000003535786" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-118194" height="675" src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2007/01/dec15-03-000003535786.jpg" width="1200" /> 
</div>
When Henrik Balmer became the production manager and a board member 
of a newly bought-out cosmetics firm, improving his network was the last
 thing on his mind. The main problem he faced was time: Where would he 
find the hours to guide his team through a major upgrade of the 
production process and then think about strategic issues like expanding 
the business? The only way he could carve out time and still get home to
 his family at a decent hour was to lock himself—literally—in his 
office. Meanwhile, there were day-to-day issues to resolve, like a 
recurring conflict with his sales director over custom orders that 
compromised production efficiency. Networking, which Henrik defined as 
the unpleasant task of trading favors with strangers, was a luxury he 
could not afford. But when a new acquisition was presented at a board 
meeting without his input, he abruptly realized he was out of the 
loop—not just inside the company, but outside, too—at a moment when his 
future in the company was at stake.<br />

Henrik’s case is not unusual. Over the past two years, we have been 
following a cohort of 30 managers making their way through what we call 
the leadership transition, an inflection point in their careers that 
challenges them to rethink both themselves and their roles. In the 
process, we’ve found that networking—creating a fabric of personal 
contacts who will provide support, feedback, insight, resources, and 
information—is simultaneously one of the most self-evident and one of 
the most dreaded developmental challenges that aspiring leaders must 
address.<br />

Their discomfort is understandable. Typically, managers rise through 
the ranks by dint of a strong command of the technical elements of their
 jobs and a nose-to-the-grindstone focus on accomplishing their teams’ 
objectives. When challenged to move beyond their functional specialties 
and address strategic issues facing the overall business, many managers 
do not immediately grasp that this will involve relational—not 
analytical—tasks. Nor do they easily understand that exchanges and 
interactions with a diverse array of current and potential stakeholders 
are not distractions from their “real work” but are actually at the 
heart of their new leadership roles.<br />

Like Henrik (whose identity we’ve disguised, along with all the other
 managers we describe here), a majority of the managers we work with say
 that they find networking insincere or manipulative—at best, an elegant
 way of using people. Not surprisingly, for every manager who 
instinctively constructs and maintains a useful network, we see several 
who struggle to overcome this innate resistance. Yet the alternative to 
networking is to fail—either in reaching for a leadership position or in
 succeeding at it.<br />

Watching our emerging leaders approach this daunting task, we 
discovered that three distinct but interdependent forms of networking—<em>operational, personal,</em> and <em>strategic</em>—played
 a vital role in their transitions. The first helped them manage current
 internal responsibilities, the second boosted their personal 
development, and the third opened their eyes to new business directions 
and the stakeholders they would need to enlist. While our managers 
differed in how well they pursued operational and personal networking, 
we discovered that almost all of them underutilized strategic 
networking. In this article, we describe key features of each networking
 form (summarized in the exhibit “The Three Forms of Networking”) and, 
using our managers’ experiences, explain how a three-pronged networking 
strategy can become part and parcel of a new leader’s development plan. <br />

<div class="exhibit">
 
 <img src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/hbr/0701/R0701C_A.gif" />
  
 <span class="exhibit-title">The Three Forms of Networking</span> <span class="exhibit-caption">Managers
 who think they are adept at networking are often operating only at an 
operational or personal level. Effective leaders learn to employ 
networks for strategic purposes.</span><br />

</div>
<h2>
Operational Networking</h2>
All managers need to build good working relationships with the people
 who can help them do their jobs. The number and breadth of people 
involved can be impressive—such operational networks include not only 
direct reports and superiors but also peers within an operational unit, 
other internal players with the power to block or support a project, and
 key outsiders such as suppliers, distributors, and customers. The 
purpose of this type of networking is to ensure coordination and 
cooperation among people who have to know and trust one another in order
 to accomplish their immediate tasks. That isn’t always easy, but it is 
relatively straightforward, because the task provides focus and a clear 
criterion for membership in the network: Either you’re necessary to the 
job and helping to get it done, or you’re not.<br />

Although operational networking was the form that came most naturally
 to the managers we studied, nearly every one had important blind spots 
regarding people and groups they depended on to make things happen. In 
one case, Alistair, an accounting manager who worked in an 
entrepreneurial firm with several hundred employees, was suddenly 
promoted by the company’s founder to financial director and given a seat
 on the board. He was both the youngest and the least-experienced board 
member, and his instinctive response to these new responsibilities was 
to reestablish his functional credentials. Acting on a hint from the 
founder that the company might go public, Alistair undertook a 
reorganization of the accounting department that would enable the books 
to withstand close scrutiny. Alistair succeeded brilliantly in upgrading
 his team’s capabilities, but he missed the fact that only a minority of
 the seven-person board shared the founder’s ambition. A year into 
Alistair’s tenure, discussion about whether to take the company public 
polarized the board, and he discovered that all that time cleaning up 
the books might have been better spent sounding out his codirectors.<br />

One of the problems with an exclusive reliance on operational 
networks is that they are usually geared toward meeting objectives as 
assigned, not toward asking the strategic question, “What <em>should</em>
 we be doing?” By the same token, managers do not exercise as much 
personal choice in assembling operational relationships as they do in 
weaving personal and strategic networks, because to a large extent the 
right relationships are prescribed by the job and organizational 
structure. Thus, most operational networking occurs within an 
organization, and ties are determined in large part by routine, 
short-term demands. Relationships formed with outsiders, such as board 
members, customers, and regulators, are directly task-related and tend 
to be bounded and constrained by demands determined at a higher level. 
Of course, an individual manager can choose to deepen and develop the 
ties to different extents, and all managers exercise discretion over who
 gets priority attention. It’s the quality of relationships—the rapport 
and mutual trust—that gives an operational network its power. 
Nonetheless, the substantial constraints on network membership mean 
these connections are unlikely to deliver value to managers beyond 
assistance with the task at hand. 
  <br />

<div class="article-callout">
 <div class="callout-contents">
  As a manager moves into a leadership role, his or her network must reorient itself externally and toward the future.<br />
 
 </div>
</div>
The typical manager in our group was more concerned with sustaining 
cooperation within the existing network than with building relationships
 to face nonroutine or unforeseen challenges. But as a manager moves 
into a leadership role, his or her network must reorient itself 
externally and toward the future.<br />

<div class="promo--right">
 <div class="advertising">
  <div id="DFP_IC_pos3">
   
  </div>
</div>
</div>
<h2>
Personal Networking</h2>
We observed that once aspiring leaders like Alistair awaken to the 
dangers of an excessively internal focus, they begin to seek kindred 
spirits outside their organizations. Simultaneously, they become aware 
of the limitations of their social skills, such as a lack of knowledge 
about professional domains beyond their own, which makes it difficult 
for them to find common ground with people outside their usual circles. 
Through professional associations, alumni groups, clubs, and personal 
interest communities, managers gain new perspectives that allow them to 
advance in their careers. This is what we mean by personal networking.<br />

Many of the managers we study question why they should spend precious
 time on an activity so indirectly related to the work at hand. Why 
widen one’s circle of casual acquaintances when there isn’t time even 
for urgent tasks? The answer is that these contacts provide important 
referrals, information, and, often, developmental support such as 
coaching and mentoring. A newly appointed factory director, for example,
 faced with a turnaround-or-close-down situation that was paralyzing his
 staff, joined a business organization—and through it met a lawyer who 
became his counsel in the turnaround. Buoyed by his success, he 
networked within his company’s headquarters in search of someone who had
 dealt with a similar crisis. Eventually, he found two mentors.<br />

A personal network can also be a safe space for personal development 
and as such can provide a foundation for strategic networking. The 
experience of Timothy, a principal in a midsize software company, is a 
good example. Like his father, Timothy stuttered. When he had the 
opportunity to prepare for meetings, his stutter was not an issue, but 
spontaneous encounters inside and outside the company were dreadfully 
painful. To solve this problem, he began accepting at least two 
invitations per week to the social gatherings he had assiduously ignored
 before. Before each event, he asked who else had been invited and did 
background research on the other guests so that he could initiate 
conversations. The hardest part, he said, was “getting through the 
door.” Once inside, his interest in the conversations helped him forget 
himself and master his stutter. As his stutter diminished, he also 
applied himself to networking across his company, whereas previously he 
had taken refuge in his technical expertise. Like Timothy, several of 
our emerging leaders successfully used personal networking as a 
relatively safe way to expose problems and seek insight into 
solutions—safe, that is, compared with strategic networking, in which 
the stakes are far higher.<br />

Personal networks are largely external, made up of discretionary 
links to people with whom we have something in common. As a result, what
 makes a personal network powerful is its referral potential. According 
to the famous six degrees of separation principle, our personal contacts
 are valuable to the extent that they help us reach, in as few 
connections as possible, the far-off person who has the information we 
need.<br />

In watching managers struggle to widen their professional 
relationships in ways that feel both natural and legitimate to them, we 
repeatedly saw them shift their time and energy from operational to 
personal networking. For people who have rarely looked outside their 
organizations, this is an important first step, one that fosters a 
deeper understanding of themselves and the environments in which they 
move. Ultimately, however, personal networking alone won’t propel 
managers through the leadership transition. Aspiring leaders may find 
people who awaken new interests but fail to become comfortable with the 
power players at the level above them. Or they may achieve new influence
 within a professional community but fail to harness those ties in the 
service of organizational goals. That’s why managers who know they need 
to develop their networking skills, and make a real effort to do so, 
nonetheless may end up feeling like they have wasted their time and 
energy. As we’ll see, personal networking will not help a manager 
through the leadership transition unless he or she learns how to bring 
those connections to bear on organizational strategy.<br />

<h2>
Strategic Networking</h2>
When managers begin the delicate transition from functional manager 
to business leader, they must start to concern themselves with broad 
strategic issues. Lateral and vertical relationships with other 
functional and business unit managers—all people outside their immediate
 control—become a lifeline for figuring out how their own contributions 
fit into the big picture. Thus strategic networking plugs the aspiring 
leader into a set of relationships and information sources that 
collectively embody the power to achieve personal and organizational 
goals. <br />

<h4 class="sidebar-title">
From Functional Manager to Business Leader: How Companies Can Help</h4>
<div class="sidebar-contents height--collapse">
  Executives who oversee management development know how to spot 
critical inflection points: the moments when highly successful people 
must change their perspective on what is important and, accordingly, how
 they spend their time. Many organizations still promote people on the 
basis of their performance in roles whose requirements differ 
dramatically from those of leadership roles. And many new leaders feel 
that they are going it alone, without coaching or guidance. By being 
sensitive to the fact that most strong technical or functional managers 
lack the capabilities required to build strategic networks that advance 
their personal and professional goals, human resources and learning 
professionals can take steps to help in this important area. <br />
 
  For example, Genesis Park, an innovative in-house leadership 
development program at PricewaterhouseCoopers, focuses explicitly on 
building networks. The five-month program, during which participants are
 released from their client responsibilities, includes business case 
development, strategic projects, team building, change management 
projects, and in-depth discussions with business leaders from inside and
 outside the company. The young leaders who participate end up with a 
strong internal-external nexus of ties to support them as their careers 
evolve. <br />
 
  Companies that recognize the importance of leadership networking 
can also do a lot to help people overcome their innate discomfort by 
creating natural ways for them to extend their networks. When Nissan CEO
 Carlos Ghosn sought to break down crippling internal barriers at the 
company, he created cross-functional teams of middle managers from 
diverse units and charged them with proposing solutions to problems 
ranging from supply costs to product design. Nissan subsequently 
institutionalized the teams, not just as a way to solve problems but 
also to encourage lateral networks. Rather than avoid the extra work, 
aspiring leaders ask for these assignments. <br />
 
  Most professional development is based on the notion that 
successful people acquire new role-appropriate skills as they move up 
the hierarchy. But making the transition from manager to leader requires
 subtraction as well as addition: To make room for new competencies, 
managers must rely less on their older, well-honed skills. To do so, 
they must change their perspective on how to add value and what to 
contribute. Eventually, they must also transform how they think and who 
they are. Companies that help their top talent reinvent themselves will 
better prepare them for a successful leadership transition.<br />
 
 </div>
<div class="sidebar-fade">
 </div>
<div class="sidebar-expand">
 Read more</div>
Operating beside players with diverse affiliations, backgrounds, 
objectives, and incentives requires a manager to formulate business 
rather than functional objectives, and to work through the coalitions 
and networks needed to sell ideas and compete for resources. Consider 
Sophie, a manager who, after rising steadily through the ranks in 
logistics and distribution, was stupefied to learn that the CEO was 
considering a radical reorganization of her function that would strip 
her of some responsibilities. Rewarded to date for incremental annual 
improvements, she had failed to notice shifting priorities in the wider 
market and the resulting internal shuffle for resources and power at the
 higher levels of her company. Although she had built a loyal, 
high-performing team, she had few relationships outside her group to 
help her anticipate the new imperatives, let alone give her ideas about 
how to respond. After she argued that distribution issues were her 
purview, and failed to be persuasive, she hired consultants to help her 
prepare a counterproposal. But Sophie’s boss simply concluded that she 
lacked a broad, longer-term business perspective. Frustrated, Sophie 
contemplated leaving the company. Only after some patient coaching from a
 senior manager did she understand that she had to get out of her unit 
and start talking to opinion leaders inside and outside the company to 
form a sellable plan for the future. 
  <br />

What differentiates a leader from a manager, research tells us, is 
the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and 
groups necessary to get there. Recruiting stakeholders, lining up allies
 and sympathizers, diagnosing the political landscape, and brokering 
conversations among unconnected parties are all part of a leader’s job. 
As they step up to the leadership transition, some managers accept their
 growing dependence on others and seek to transform it into mutual 
influence. Others dismiss such work as “political” and, as a result, 
undermine their ability to advance their goals.<br />

Several of the participants in our sample chose the latter approach, 
justifying their choice as a matter of personal values and integrity. In
 one case, Jody, who managed a department in a large company under what 
she described as “dysfunctional” leadership, refused even to try to 
activate her extensive network within the firm when internal adversaries
 took over key functions of her unit. When we asked her why she didn’t 
seek help from anyone in the organization to stop this coup, she replied
 that she refused to play “stupid political games….You can only do what 
you think is the ethical and right thing from your perspective.” Stupid 
or not, those games cost her the respect and support of her direct 
reports and coworkers, who hesitated to follow someone they perceived as
 unwilling to defend herself. Eventually she had no choice but to leave.<br />

The key to a good strategic network is leverage: the ability to 
marshal information, support, and resources from one sector of a network
 to achieve results in another. Strategic networkers use indirect 
influence, convincing one person in the network to get someone else, who
 is not in the network, to take a needed action. Moreover, strategic 
networkers don’t just influence their relational environment; they shape
 it in their own image by moving and hiring subordinates, changing 
suppliers and sources of financing, lobbying to place allies in peer 
positions, and even restructuring their boards to create networks 
favorable to their business goals. Jody abjured such tactics, but her 
adversaries did not.<br />

Strategic networking can be difficult for emerging leaders because it
 absorbs a significant amount of the time and energy that managers 
usually devote to meeting their many operational demands. This is one 
reason why many managers drop their strategic networking precisely when 
they need it most: when their units are in trouble and only outside 
support can rescue them. The trick is not to hide in the operational 
network but to develop it into a more strategic one.<br />

One manager we studied, for example, used lateral and functional 
contacts throughout his firm to resolve tensions with his boss that 
resulted from substantial differences in style and strategic approaches 
between the two. Tied down in operational chores at a distant location, 
the manager had lost contact with headquarters. He resolved the 
situation by simultaneously obliging his direct reports to take on more 
of the local management effort and sending messages through his network 
that would help bring him back into the loop with the boss.<br />

<div class="promo--right">
 <div class="advertising">
  <div id="DFP_IC_pos4">
   
  </div>
</div>
</div>
Operational, personal, and strategic networks are not mutually 
exclusive. One manager we studied used his personal passion, hunting, to
 meet people from professions as diverse as stonemasonry and household 
moving. Almost none of these hunting friends had anything to do with his
 work in the consumer electronics industry, yet they all had to deal 
with one of his own daily concerns: customer relations. Hearing about 
their problems and techniques allowed him to view his own from a 
different perspective and helped him define principles that he could 
test in his work. Ultimately, what began as a personal network of 
hunting partners became operationally and strategically valuable to this
 manager. The key was his ability to build inside-outside links for 
maximum leverage. But we’ve seen others who avoided networking, or 
failed at it, because they let interpersonal chemistry, not strategic 
needs, determine which relationships they cultivated.<br />

<h2>
Just Do It</h2>
The word “work” is part of networking, and it is not easy work, 
because it involves reaching outside the borders of a manager’s comfort 
zone. How, then, can managers lessen the pain and increase the gain? The
 trick is to leverage the elements from each domain of networking into 
the others—to seek out personal contacts who can be objective, strategic
 counselors, for example, or to transform colleagues in adjacent 
functions into a constituency. Above all, many managers will need to 
change their attitudes about the legitimacy and necessity of networking.<br />

<h3>
Mind your mind-set.</h3>
In our ongoing discussions with managers learning to improve their 
networking skills, we often hear, “That’s all well and good, but I 
already have a day job.” Others, like Jody, consider working through 
networks a way to rely on “whom you know” rather than “what you know”—a 
hypocritical, even unethical way to get things done. Whatever the 
reason, when aspiring leaders do not believe that networking is one of 
the most important requirements of their new jobs, they will not 
allocate enough time and effort to see it pay off. 
  <br />

The best solution we’ve seen to this trap is a good role model. Many 
times, what appears to be unpalatable or unproductive behavior takes on a
 new light when a person you respect does it well and ethically. For 
example, Gabriel Chenard, general manager for Europe of a group of 
consumer product brands, learned from the previous general manager how 
to take advantage of branch visits to solidify his relationships with 
employees and customers. Every flight and car trip became a venue for 
catching up and building relationships with the people who were 
accompanying him. Watching how much his boss got done on what would 
otherwise be downtime, Gabriel adopted the practice as a crucial part of
 his own management style. Networking effectively and ethically, like 
any other tacit skill, is a matter of judgment and intuition. We learn 
by observing and getting feedback from those for whom it’s second 
nature.<br />

<h3>
Work from the outside in.</h3>
One of the most daunting aspects of strategic networking is that 
there often seems to be no natural “excuse” for making contact with a 
more senior person outside one’s function or business unit. It’s 
difficult to build a relationship with anyone, let alone a senior 
executive, without a reason for interacting, like a common task or a 
shared purpose.<br />

Some successful managers find common ground from the outside in—by, 
for instance, transposing a personal interest into the strategic domain.
 Linda Henderson is a good example. An investment banker responsible for
 a group of media industry clients, she always wondered how to connect 
to some of her senior colleagues who served other industries. She 
resolved to make time for an extracurricular passion—the theater—in a 
way that would enhance her business development activities. Four times a
 year, her secretary booked a buffet dinner at a downtown hotel and 
reserved a block of theater tickets. Key clients were invited. Through 
these events, Linda not only developed her own business but also learned
 about her clients’ companies in a way that generated ideas for other 
parts of her firm, thus enabling her to engage with colleagues.<br />

Other managers build outside-inside connections by using their 
functional interests or expertise. For example, communities of practice 
exist (or can easily be created on the Internet) in almost every area of
 business from brand management to Six Sigma to global strategy. Savvy 
managers reach out to kindred spirits outside their organizations to 
contribute and multiply their knowledge; the information they glean, in 
more cases than not, becomes the “hook” for making internal connections.
 <br />

<div class="article-callout">
 <div class="callout-contents">
  Savvy managers reach out to kindred spirits outside their 
organizations to contribute and multiply their knowledge; the 
information they glean, in more cases than not, becomes the “hook” for 
making internal connections.<br />
 
 </div>
</div>
<h3>
Re-allocate your time.</h3>
If an aspiring leader has not yet mastered the art of delegation, he 
or she will find many reasons not to spend time networking. 
Participating in formal and informal meetings with people in other units
 takes time away from functional responsibilities and internal team 
affairs. Between the obvious payoff of a task accomplished and the 
ambiguous, often delayed rewards of networking, naive managers 
repeatedly choose the former. The less they practice networking, the 
less efficient at it they become, and the vicious cycle continues.<br />

Henrik, the production manager and board member we described earlier,
 for example, did what he needed to do in order to prepare for board 
meetings but did not associate with fellow board members outside those 
formal events. As a result, he was frequently surprised when other board
 members raised issues at the heart of his role. In contrast, effective 
business leaders spend a lot of time every day gathering the information
 they need to meet their goals, relying on informal discussions with a 
lot of people who are not necessarily in charge of an issue or task. 
They network in order to obtain information continually, not just at 
formal meetings.<br />

<h3>
Ask and you shall receive.</h3>
Many managers equate having a good network with having a large 
database of contacts, or attending high-profile professional conferences
 and events. In fact, we’ve seen people kick off a networking initiative
 by improving their record keeping or adopting a network management 
tool. But they falter at the next step—picking up the phone. Instead, 
they wait until they need something <em>badly</em>. The best networkers 
do exactly the opposite: They take every opportunity to give to, and 
receive from, the network, whether they need help or not.<br />

A network lives and thrives only when it is used. A good way to begin
 is to make a simple request or take the initiative to connect two 
people who would benefit from meeting each other. Doing 
something—anything—gets the ball rolling and builds confidence that one 
does, in fact, have something to contribute. 
  <br />

<h3>
Stick to it.</h3>
It takes a while to reap the benefits of networking. We have seen 
many managers resolve to put networking at the top of their agendas, 
only to be derailed by the first crisis that comes along. One example is
 Harris Roberts, a regulatory affairs expert who realized he needed a 
broader network to achieve his goal of becoming a business unit manager.
 To force himself into what felt like an “unnatural act,” Harris 
volunteered to be the liaison for his business school cohort’s alumni 
network. But six months later, when a major new-drug approval process 
overwhelmed his calendar, Harris dropped all outside activities. Two 
years later, he found himself out of touch and still a functional 
manager. He failed to recognize that by not taking the time to attend 
industry conferences or compare notes with his peers, he was missing out
 on the strategic perspective and information that would make him a more
 attractive candidate for promotion.<br />

Building a leadership network is less a matter of skill than of will.
 When first efforts do not bring quick rewards, some may simply conclude
 that networking isn’t among their talents. But networking is not a 
talent; nor does it require a gregarious, extroverted personality. It is
 a skill, one that takes practice. We have seen over and over again that
 people who work at networking can learn not only how to do it well but 
also how to enjoy it. And they tend to be more successful in their 
careers than those who fail to leverage external ties or insist on 
defining their jobs narrowly.<br />

Making a successful leadership transition requires a shift from the 
confines of a clearly defined operational network. Aspiring leaders must
 learn to build and use strategic networks that cross organizational and
 functional boundaries, and then link them up in novel and innovative 
ways. It is a challenge to make the leap from a lifetime of functional 
contributions and hands-on control to the ambiguous process of building 
and working through networks. Leaders must find new ways of defining 
themselves and develop new relationships to anchor and feed their 
emerging personas. They must also accept that networking is one of the 
most important requirements of their new leadership roles and continue 
to allocate enough time and effort to see it pay off.<br />

How Leaders Create and Use Networks

When Henrik Balmer became the production manager and a board member of a newly bought-out cosmetics firm, improving his netwo...

3 Things the Most Creative Leaders Do

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div>
 <img alt="dec15-10-51470490" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-119230" height="675" src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/12/dec15-10-51470490.jpg" width="1200" />
</div>
Over the past three decades at IDEO, I’ve worked with some of the 
most innovative companies in the world and seen a lot of creative 
leaders in action. I’ve paid attention to how the best of them operate —
 how they nurture creativity all around them — and I’ve noticed three 
things:<br />

<strong>They build core enthusiast communities inside and outside of their organizations. </strong>Chris
 Anderson, CEO of drone-maker 3D Robotics, started seeking knowledge and
 insight from drone aficionados with his website DIYDrones long before 
he ever hired his first employee, and has continued to practice 
open-source innovation in the years since. The company nurtures its 
creative community and recognizes participation at every level. When a 
contributor offers even the simplest input, the company sends him or her
 a T-shirt, signifying inclusion in 3D Robotics’ tribe of “insiders.” As
 bright people from around the world ratchet up their participation, 
they might instead get plane tickets so they can travel to the company’s
 headquarters and meet its leaders in person. Some eventually cross over
 to become full-time employees. The free-flowing exchange, in which 
employees, partners, and collaborators gain social capital through their
 creative input, has helped propel growth. 3D Robotics currently makes 
more consumer and commercial drones than any other company in America.<br />

<h4 class="promo-title">
Further Reading</h4>
<div class="promo-contents">
 
  <ul>
<li>
    <div class="overflow-auto">
 
     <figure class="left product-thumb"> 
      <img src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/11/15034E_500.png" /> 
     </figure> 
     <div class="product-thumb-margin">
 
      <h6 class="hed mbs">
<a href="https://hbr.org/product/innovative-teams-hbr-20-minute-manager-series/15034-PDF-ENG?referral=02560">Innovative Teams (20-Minute Manager Series)</a></h6>
<div class="stream-item-info">
 
       <span class="topic">Innovation</span> 
       <span class="content-type">Book</span> 
       <ul class="byline byline-list line-height-tight">
        Harvard Business Review
       </ul>
<div class="mvs">
 
        <span class="price">12.95</span> 
         
          
         <a class="alt-action pts mls" href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/3-things-the-most-creative-leaders-do#">Add to Cart</a> 
        
       </div>
<ul class="stream-utility">
<li class="utility util-save"><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/3-things-the-most-creative-leaders-do#"> Save</a></li>
<li class="utility util-share"><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/3-things-the-most-creative-leaders-do#"> Share</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<strong>They achieve big change through a series of small experiments. </strong>Many
 years ago, Jim Hackett, then CEO of Steelcase — a long-time IDEO 
strategic partner — wanted to get his top executives to move to open 
workspaces. Then, as now in many organizations, the private office was a
 privilege of rank, but because Steelcase was a global leader in system 
furniture, Hackett thought it was important for its managers to walk the
 talk and demonstrate the value of working in non-traditional office 
formats. He had a hunch that if he simply announced a sweeping change — 
out with the old way and in with the new — many of his execs would have 
resisted and asked to be exempted.<br />

So Jim instead proposed a small experiment. He asked his management 
team to join him in a six-month prototype of the company’s open 
“Leadership Community.” All he wanted was for them to give it an honest 
try for a limited time, using the best of Steelcase’s own products, and 
he promised that whatever was not working at the end of six months would
 be addressed. When a respected leader asks you to join a short 
experiment, it’s very hard to say no, or even complain. And no one did. 
Though it has evolved over time, Steelcase’s six-month experiment turned
 into 20 years. The executives never went back to their private offices.<br />

<strong>They jump-start their innovation journey with storytelling.</strong>
 Marketers have always understood how great messaging contributes to the
 success of new products, services, and brands. And the best creative 
leaders are now screening ideas from the very beginning for the 
potential to both delight customers and also tell an engaging story. 
Jane Park, CEO of the beauty-products start-up Julep, worked with IDEO 
to find a breakthrough in nail polish that would spark new conversations
 among core users, known as “mavens.” The design research highlighted an
 issue long understood but never fully addressed: the difficulty that 
women have applying nail polish when holding the brush in their 
non-dominant hand. Park and her team realized that all tools requiring 
precision — like a pencil or a paintbrush, or even a surgeon’s scalpel —
 have length. So they developed a long, articulated handle — dubbed Plié
 — which allows users to get a smoother, more precise finish and also 
docks magnetically to the nail polish cap.<br />

The creative solution had value all its own, but the origin story 
linking Plié to other tools gave it the buzz it needed to catch on. It 
helped win the hearts and minds of both Julep’s internal team and 
external stakeholders out in the marketplace. Noting the combination of 
great stories and an invested community, <em>Forbes</em> recently suggested that Julep might be “the next billion-dollar beauty brand.”<br />

There are, of course, many other ways that creative leaders push 
their colleagues and their companies to achieve greatness. But 
community-building, experimentation, and storytelling are three very 
important pieces of their repertoire.</div>

3 Things the Most Creative Leaders Do

Over the past three decades at IDEO, I’ve worked with some of the most innovative companies in the world and seen a lot of creative l...

How to Free Your Innate Creativity

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="artwork-narrow mbn pbn">
 <img alt="dec15-11-hbr-nguyen-img-033-v" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-119439" height="960" src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/12/dec15-11-hbr-nguyen-img-033-v.jpg" width="540" /> 
 <div class="credit ptn mtn">
  <em>Andrew Nguyen/HBR STAFF</em>
 </div>
</div>
Creativity can feel like an accident. Suddenly, out of nowhere a 
novel idea shows up in conscious thought and we’ve solved that 
persistent problem. Or, after days of staring at a blank page, words fly
 off our fingertips and we’ve written that perfect blog post or 
editorial. Some attribute creativity to brilliance, but we now know just
 being smart isn’t enough.<br />

We are creative when conditions in our minds are just right. When we 
have access to our intellect, knowledge, and experience, our brains can 
light up with new idea. We can solve the unsolvable problem and imagine a
 new reality.<br />

But <em>what</em> we think about consciously is not all it takes. According to scholar <a href="http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/07/22/the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-creativity/">Arne Dietrich</a>, <em>how</em>
 our brains function is key to understanding the process of creativity. 
Specifically, the neocortex and the limbic system — the seats of 
rational thought and emotions — affect both spontaneous and deliberate 
creativity. According to Dietrich, thoughts and emotions work together 
when we are having that “Eureka” moment, or experience artistic 
inspiration. And when thoughts and emotions work in tandem, we can also 
be more deliberately creative. For example, we can consciously tap 
long-term and emotional memories, resulting in the <a href="https://hbr.org/product/becoming-a-resonant-leader-develop-your-emotional-intelligence-renew-your-relationships-sustain-your-effectiveness/an/1734-PBK-ENG">deliberate generation of ideas or insights</a>.<br />

Simply put, we need to be in the right emotional state in order to be
 creative — brain functioning affects creativity and how we feel affects
 brain functioning. But unfortunately, that’s easier said than done in 
today’s workplace.<br />

<h4 class="promo-title">
Further Reading</h4>
<div class="promo-contents">
 
  <ul>
<li>
    <div class="overflow-auto">
 
     <figure class="left product-thumb"> 
      <img src="https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/11/11363E_500.png" /> 
     </figure> 
     <div class="product-thumb-margin">
 
      <h6 class="hed mbs">
<a href="https://hbr.org/product/hbr-s-10-must-reads-on-innovation-with-featured-article-the-discipline-of-innovation-by-peter-f-drucker-hbr-s-10-must-reads/11363-PBK-ENG?referral=02560">HBR Must Reads on Innovation</a></h6>
<div class="stream-item-info">
 
       <span class="topic">Innovation</span> 
       <span class="content-type">Book</span> 
       <ul class="byline byline-list line-height-tight">
        Harvard Business Review
       </ul>
<div class="mvs">
 
        <span class="price">24.95</span> 
         
          
         <a class="alt-action pts mls" href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-to-free-your-innate-creativity#">Add to Cart</a> 
        
       </div>
<ul class="stream-utility">
<li class="utility util-save"><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-to-free-your-innate-creativity#"> Save</a></li>
<li class="utility util-share"><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-to-free-your-innate-creativity#"> Share</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
Far too many organizations have <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/proof-that-positive-work-cultures-are-more-productive">cultures that support negativity and cynicism</a> — and far too many <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/its-better-to-avoid-a-toxic-employee-than-hire-a-superstar">managers are toxic</a>.
 Most people don’t set out to be poisonous or to harm the people who 
depend on them, but it happens, in large part because of chronic stress.
 The constant pressures at work, coupled with a changing and often 
baffling world, leave a lot of us at the mercy of the sacrifice 
syndrome, where we give and give and give until there’s nothing left. 
The human organism doesn’t do well under such conditions. Our brains 
literally begin to shut down. We filter information, keeping only that 
which we feel we must have in order to survive. We become hyper-focused 
on potential threats. We don’t see reality clearly.<br />

The negative emotions swirling inside and around us derail normal brain functioning, not to mention creativity.<br />

If you want to regain your innate creative abilities, you need to 
interrupt this cycle. Start by taking better care of yourself. This 
means more sleep. New studies are confirming that adults really do need a
 significant amount of sleep a day in order to function well — <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/sleep-experts-close-in-on-the-optimal-nights-sleep-1405984970">7 to 9 hours of it</a>. Don’t believe leaders who say “I only need four or five hours a night.” They’re wrong and they’re sending the wrong message.<br />

Good food and exercise matter too, and thankfully the <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/02/in-defense-of-corporate-wellness-programs/">wellness movement</a>
 in many organizations is starting to legitimize a focus on workers’ 
health. These three — sleep, food, and exercise — are the basics for 
brain functioning (and may be obvious to some) but to tap your creative 
side you’ll also need to make some real changes in what you do and how 
you do it at work. Here are a few practical suggestions that will help 
to heal your brain and free your innate creativity:<br />

<ul>
<li>Break your most destructive, focus-killing habits, like <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/09/fixing-our-unhealthy-obsession-with-work-email">spending a large portion of your day (or weekend) on email</a> or <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/07/just-hearing-your-phone-buzz-hurts-your-productivity">giving in to persistent distractions</a>.</li>
<li>Force yourself to take time to think and reflect. <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/01/mindfulness-can-literally-change-your-brain">Mindfulness</a> —
 reflective meditative practices — is extremely helpful when it comes to
 managing stress and cognitive functioning. As scholar <a href="http://www.shareguide.com/Goleman.html">Dan Goleman</a>
 has told us for years, “Mindfulness…the ability to notice what is going
 on as it arises and to pause before we respond is a crucial emotional 
skill. Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to 
inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.” Take a <a href="http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/about-us/people/2-meet-our-faculty/kabat-zinn-profile/">mindfulness based stress reduction</a> course or just read up and try some breathing exercises.</li>
<li><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/great-leaders-know-theyre-not-perfect">Stop fretting about your deficiencies and failures</a>. This may be most difficult for achievement oriented business people, but how can anyone possibly be creative without <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure">failing — a lot</a>?</li>
<li>Focus on what makes you <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/11/being-happy-at-work-matters">happy at work</a>.
 The positive emotions generated when you feel connected to your 
personal and organizational purpose — what really matters about what you
 do — will help you to stay grounded and creative, even when things are 
tough.</li>
</ul>
These changes are especially critical for leaders who want to help 
their teams be creative. When you’ve taken care of yourself, you’ll be 
in a better position to help others. While you can’t fix the stress and 
pressure in your entire company, you can focus on creating a 
“microculture” around you that is marked by values like respect and 
commitment to one another’s goals. You can create norms that guide 
people to treat one another well, to rise to meet challenges with 
dedication, resilience, and humor. You can encourage people to grow and 
develop, to dream big. You can also ensure that people know that a 
healthy, whole life comes first — that work’s just a part of the 
picture.<br />

We can’t come up with a formula for how to be more creative or how to
 help our teams to innovate. We can, however, deliberately craft an 
environment that is ripe with hope, enthusiasm, and team spirit. In 
teams marked by this kind of emotional tone, people are more likely to 
work collaboratively, persist, and bounce back from setbacks. People 
thrive in resonant environments. And because creativity happens in our 
brains, a resonant environment helps you to think more clearly — and 
more creatively.</div>

How to Free Your Innate Creativity

Andrew Nguyen/HBR STAFF Creativity can feel like an accident. Suddenly, out of nowhere a novel idea shows up in conscious thou...

Hello

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.</div>
</div>

Hello

Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! Y...

Place your ads for free

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.</div>

Place your ads for free

Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! You can place your ads for free here on our site.Hello there! Yo...

GeoreveBusinessGist

ads

To Get More Creative, Become Less Productive

The CEO’s Second Act

How Leaders Create and Use Networks

3 Things the Most Creative Leaders Do

How to Free Your Innate Creativity

Hello

Place your ads for free

Blog Archive

Featured Post

To Get More Creative, Become Less Productive

Popular Posts