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Corporate innovation is an often misunderstood process, largely because managing it successfully requires inherently contradictory aims, such as control and freedom. This article looks at a variety of approaches by leading authorities.

A number of recent books have examined the paradoxical tensions at the heart of the innovation process. The article assesses the guidance they offer practitioners on how to manage a process replete with conflict and contradictions.

Several authors suggest unconventional approaches to unleash the talents of individuals and groups in ways that are productive for the organization.

One of the main challenges in leading innovation is to cultivate both cohesion and dissent.

This masterclass is a useful primer for practitioners leading an innovation initiative.

Brian Leavy interviews Chris Kuenne and John Danner about research into entrepreneurial personality published in their new book Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win Corporate.

By studying personality types, executives can learn how different types of successful entrepreneurs function, how they’re wired, motivated, lead and manage.

Using Kuenne’s and Danner’s“Builder Personality Discovery” instrument, corporations can begin to recognize which types of potential entrepreneurs they have, and then how best to support and reward their efforts in creating new business value.

Each typically interacts differently to five major dynamic challenges that every business builder faces, the “solution dynamic,” the “team dynamic,” the “customer dynamic,” the “sponsor dynamic” and the ‘scale dynamic.’

Essential insights for corporate leaders championing entrepreneurial business builders in their firms and for assessing leaders of potential acquisitions.

McKinsey partners, Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field are championing the premise that the need for a fundamental rethink of the role of middle management in today’s organizations is now more urgent than ever.

So what should the new blueprint be for middle management as the crucial link between the executive level and the front line S&L interviewer Prof Brian Leavy asks the authors of Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work.

Companies with top quartile management practices can have more than three times the return to shareholders than other companies.

Because of middle managers’ proximity to the front line, they have a helpful, realistic perspective on how new tools like generative AI should be adopted throughout the organization.

The authors found that middle managers deliver the most value to the organization when they can serve as coaches, connectors, talent managers and strategists. For senior leaders to truly put middle managers at the forefront, they must give managers space to grow and the license to manage in a way that works for them and their team.

Over the last two decades Bill George has been researching the basic ingredients of authentic leadership through one of the most extensive empirical studies of leadership ever undertaken. He and his team have extended their research to include both international and rising generation leaders and parlayed their findings into a development process aimed at helping current and aspiring leaders to become both more authentic and effective. His latest book, True North: Leading Authentically in Today’s Workplace (Emerging Leader Edition), is co-authored with Zach Clayton.

Interview with authors Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, and Zach Clayton, CEO of Three Ships, conducted by Brian Leavy, Emeritus Professor of Strategy at Dublin City University Business School, a Strategy &Leadership contributing editor and author of the S&L masterclass, “ Effective leadership today – character, not just competence.

Authentic leaders engender trust and develop genuine connections, which enables them to motivate people to achieve high levels of performance.

“I believe the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself.” -- Bill George

“The authors interviewed hundreds of CEOs and found that the self-awareness that they develop in the process of self-discovery is the most essential determinant of their effectiveness as a leader.”

This masterclass examines former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's personal memoir of her life and career as a study of authentic leadership in action, and her concept of “good power” through which she distills the major insights on leadership she gleaned along the way.

This masterclass examines the insights from a former IBM CEO's “memoir with purpose” as an example of the classic perspective on authentic leadership developed in the “True North” series of studies by Harvard's Bill George and his research associates over two decades.

Ginni Rometty's “good power” concept and principles, as developed in her “memoir with purpose,” represent a practical guide for aspiring leaders seeking to become a positive force for change, and they make a valuable addition to the literature on authentic leadership.

Her “good power” concept and experience-based principles, as developed in her “memoir with purpose” make a valuable addition to the literature on authentic leadership.

Her “good power” concept and principles, as developed in her “memoir with purpose,” represent a practical guide for aspiring leaders seeking to become a positive force for change.

Her memoir, with its conception of “good power,” strongly encourages corporate leaders to adopt a “stakeholder perspective” and become more active and outspoken, forces for positive change in the wider societies within which they operate.

Reflective memoirs as analytical as this one, from someone who has led at the highest level in the business world, are still rare in the genre.

China’s biggest contribution to Africa’s modernization is more likely to come from the rapidly expanding number of Chinese migrants determined to seek their fortunes by setting up manufacturing businesses across the continent, according to Irene Yuan Sun in her new book The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment is Reshaping Africa. She is interviewed by S&L contributing editor Brian Leavy.

Irene Sun, a senior McKinsey consultant has spent years researching infrastructure modernization and manufacturing expansion in Africa for her new book.

China is the fastest-growing source of foreign investment in Africa, and this has enormous consequences for Africa and for the global economy.

Nowadays, a lot of the managers with the needed skills and resilience are Chinese people who worked their way up in factories in China in conditions that not so long ago were very similar to what’s in Africa today.

Sun’s big insight: “I’d like Westerners to understand that China’s activities in Africa don’t represent a threat, either to Africa or to the West.” For Western observers who are alarmed by China’s strategy of investing in African infrastructure to gain favorable access to its natural resources she offers a new context: China’s experience at industrialization under primitive conditions can transform Africa into the next Factory of the World.

Few have done more to advance the cause of a customer-first approach over the last two decades than Fred Reichheld, pioneer in the area of the customer loyalty economics. He is interviewed by S&L Contributing editor Brian Leavy.

Reichheld’s new book, Winning on Purpose, argues that there is one (and only one) purpose that generates long-term prosperity for a business and that is to enrich the lives of customers.

Reichheld’s book shows how customer capitalism can promise not only economic advance but also help to further humanize and elevate the world of business.

Putting customers first is what enables firms to serve all stakeholders well.

An important read for leaders, Reichheld’s significant advice to them is: Decisions and priorities must be explained in terms of values, principles and purpose, not simply profits.

The author explains how the story of China geo-political vision has recently taken a new turn under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and signals a major shift towards a more expansive and outward-looking economic policy.

Understanding more fully what is happening in the latest phase of China’s modern resurgence is a strategic imperative for both public policy analysts and corporate leaders with global interests and ambitions.

China is now convinced that extending its ‘infrastructure and connectivity” focus outwards in this way will help ‘to dismantle investment barriers, create new trade routes, improve international logistics and deepen financial integration.’

Beijing is ‘adamant’ that it should not be called a ‘plan’ or a ‘strategy’ lest it ‘be interpreted as ruse to build a vast economic empire.’

China's BRI extends beyond ports, railways and highways to other major types of infrastructure including oil and gas pipelines, electricity power plants and telecommunications networks. So the invitation to be part of BRI presents ‘a vast economic carrot,’ and the prospect of becoming major hubs on emerging new pan-regional trade routes is enormously attractive to many of China’s underdeveloped neighbors. 10;

Roger L. Martin, one of the most respected strategists, is questioned by veteran S&L interviewer Brian Leavy. The questions range from the how and why of integrative thinking methodology to academic arguments over resource-based view of strategy.

Martin, co-author with Jennifer Riel of the new book Creating Great Choices, shares the insights they have developed while learning how to guide executives through integrative thinking methodolgy.

The necessary raw materials for an integrative solution are two opposing models. By exposing your model to other models through interaction, together you can utilize pieces of those models to generate a new one.

We see the value of prototyping solutions – expecting to be only partially right with the first prototype and learning a lot from putting the ideas into action, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and improving iteratively.

Martin’s guide to break though thinking shares the insights he has learned from working with brilliant CEOs and others who have sought to find a better solution to a dilemma or paradox than the unsatisfactory solutions confronting them.

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, the authors of Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, are interviewed by veteran Strategy & Leadership contributor, Brian Leavy.

In this book, the authors propose that leadership, at its core, is about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential. Unleashing others is the fundamental mandate of leadership.

Trust is the coin of the leader’s realm. The basic formula for building trust: people tend to trust leaders when they think they are interacting with the real person (authenticity), when they have faith in the leader’s judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that the leader cares about them (empathy).

Strategy is a primary way that leaders embed who they are, their core values and beliefs, into their organization’s behavior.

The authors’ advice to to executives: Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power. They explain how to effectively and authentically manage the leader/follower relationship.