Leading Clever Perople
HBR
Spotlight
How to Manage the Most Talented
How do you manage people who don’t want to be led and may be smarter than you?
CLEVER
PEOPLE
by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
LEADING
F
ranz Humer, the CEO and chairman of the Swiss pharma-
ceutical giant Roche, knows how difficult it is to find good ideas. “In my business of research, economies of scale don’t exist,” he says.“Globally today we spend $4 billion on R&D every year. In research there aren’t economies of scale, there are economies of ideas.” For a growing number of companies, according to Humer, competitive advantage lies in the ability to create an economy driven not by cost efficiencies but by ideas and intellectual know-how. In practice this means that leaders have to create an environment in which what we call “clever people” can thrive. These people are the handful of employees whose ideas, knowledge, and skills give them the potential to produce disproportionate value from the resources their organizations make available to them. Think, for example, of the software
Stephen Webster
72 Harvard Business Review
|
March 2007
|
hbr.org
HBR
Spotlight
How to Manage the Most Talented
programmer who creates a new piece of code or the pharmaceutical researcher who formulates a new drug. Their single innovations may bankroll an entire company for a decade. Top executives today nearly all recognize the importance of having extremely smart and highly creative people on staff. But attracting them is only half the battle. As Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, one of the world’s largest communications services companies, told us recently,“One of the biggest challenges is that there are diseconomies of scale in creative industries. If you double the number of creative people, it doesn’t mean you will be twice as creative.” You must not only attract talent but also foster an environment in which your clever people are inspired to achieve their fullest potential in
Spotlight
How to Manage the Most Talented
How do you manage people who don’t want to be led and may be smarter than you?
CLEVER
PEOPLE
by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
LEADING
F
ranz Humer, the CEO and chairman of the Swiss pharma-
ceutical giant Roche, knows how difficult it is to find good ideas. “In my business of research, economies of scale don’t exist,” he says.“Globally today we spend $4 billion on R&D every year. In research there aren’t economies of scale, there are economies of ideas.” For a growing number of companies, according to Humer, competitive advantage lies in the ability to create an economy driven not by cost efficiencies but by ideas and intellectual know-how. In practice this means that leaders have to create an environment in which what we call “clever people” can thrive. These people are the handful of employees whose ideas, knowledge, and skills give them the potential to produce disproportionate value from the resources their organizations make available to them. Think, for example, of the software
Stephen Webster
72 Harvard Business Review
|
March 2007
|
hbr.org
HBR
Spotlight
How to Manage the Most Talented
programmer who creates a new piece of code or the pharmaceutical researcher who formulates a new drug. Their single innovations may bankroll an entire company for a decade. Top executives today nearly all recognize the importance of having extremely smart and highly creative people on staff. But attracting them is only half the battle. As Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, one of the world’s largest communications services companies, told us recently,“One of the biggest challenges is that there are diseconomies of scale in creative industries. If you double the number of creative people, it doesn’t mean you will be twice as creative.” You must not only attract talent but also foster an environment in which your clever people are inspired to achieve their fullest potential in