Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People [Hardcover]

Rob Goffee (Author), Gareth Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2009

If your company is like most, it has a handful of people who generate disproportionate quantities of value: A researcher creates products that bankroll the entire organization for decades. A manager spots consumer-spending patterns no one else sees and defines new market categories your enterprise can serve. A strategist anticipates global changes and correctly interprets their business implications. Companies' competitiveness, even survival, increasingly hinge on such 'clever people'. But the truth is, clever people are as fiercely independent as they are clever - they don't want to be led. So how do you corral these players in your organization and inspire them to achieve their highest potential? In "Clever", Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones offer potent insights drawn from their extensive research. Leading clever people can be enormously challenging, yet doing so effectively is the key to your organization's sustained success. Lively and engaging, this book provides the ideas, practices, and examples you need to create an environment where your most brilliant people can flourish.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

They tend to obsess over work projects, don't like to be told what to do and need lots of space. They are video-game designer Will Wright, iMac creator Jonathan Ive and Louis Vuitton brand rejuvenator Marc Jacobs. They are the clevers, the highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them. Goffee and Jones, professors at the London School of Business, present a smart and surprisingly entertaining manual on identifying and handling these employees for optimum benefit, complete with a dos and don'ts chart. They advocate building a corporate culture catering to these individuals—following the lead of Cisco Systems, Nestlé and Google—and argue that the stagnant economy demands creative approaches to inspire productivity: the particular skills of exceptionally gifted workers can be harnessed by entire businesses, creating clever teams and corporations. The book is balanced in its treatment and also explores the flip side of cleverness, making the important caveat: the clever economy is not a utopian capitalist idyll, in its illustration of how unchecked and glamorized cleverness contributed to Wall Street's implosion. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (August 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1422122964
• ISBN-13: 978-1422122969
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #132,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rob Goffee is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where he teaches in the world-renowned Senior Executive Programme.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a "How to" Guide - But an "Awareness Raiser", September 7, 2009

By 

D. Kanigan (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People (Hardcover)

The slim book (200 pages) is set in three sections:

Part I: Leader and Led (Understanding your best talent & recognizing their importance to your company; "Clever" people frequently add disproportionate value to the firm)

Part II: Clever Teams; (Focusing on characteristics of clever teams, their environments and how they function - pitfalls and issues when assembling)

Part III: Clever Organizations (How firms can maximize potential/productivity of Clevers)

My recap:

1) Authors serve up an engaging writing style with a good mix of interviews, analysis and case studies

2) First 2-3 chapters set up the book and pack the most punch. The later chapters develop the first two.

3) Seasoned managers may find a number of common sense passages and business clichés (saying thank you for a job well done; Clevers need recognition; dysfunctional teams cause problems; 3 hour meetings might be too long). Furthermore, there is not much new in this book, but the authors lay out the do's and don'ts, the pro's and con's and the problems and opportunities - that raise levels of awareness for all managers and may connect a few dots that weren't connected before.

4) Some solid analysis and discussion around leading Clevers (leading clever people requires a degree of humility; traditional Command and control approach doesn't work; explanation and persuasion and straight talk are critical (rather than spin and training sessions)

5) Publishers earned their keep with a very pro-looking cover and packaging (over-the-top with the promises?) which would park well on your book shelf - alluring to those looking for a catchy title at an airport book stand.

6) If you are looking for a self-help manual to manage your "prima donnas" or a Top 10 List for managing your Clevers, you'll come away sorely disappointed. The book does however make a compelling case for the importance, the rewards and the challenges of managing Clevers. As many of us have found, managing Clevers isn't easy - they need feedback, they need independence, they need recognition, they need support - but not too much.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to "unleash" human potential in the "Clever Economy", October 28, 2009

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People (Hardcover)

According to Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, clever people "are the most valuable people the organization has - more valuable than their leaders (more valuable, perhaps, than even the CEO). Or, at least, they have the potential to be more valuable than anyone else." Warren Bennis once suggested that managing people resembles herding cats. Goffee and Jones suggest that managing clever people resembles herding lions and tigers...and perhaps (extending the metaphor to less-experienced but nonetheless high-potential workers) some jaguars, cougars, leopards, and cheetahs as well. Most books and articles I have read about managing talented people suggest that the challenge is to increase their value to the organization. "This book turns that challenge on its head. Clever is concerned with making the organization more valuable to clever people." They go on to suggest that those who manage them are required to recognize and accommodate two realities: "First, there needs to be an appreciation that clever people have a symbiotic relationship with their organizations. They need the sociability, infrastructure, credibility, resources and scale offered by an organization, as much as the organization needs their value-generating power. Second, unleashing the potential of clever people demands a new style of leadership. Leaders can no longer be the sole driving force for progress. They are not the one who leads the charge up the mountain. Rather, they must identify the clever people with the potential to reach the summit, connect with others, and help them get there."

The observations, suggestions, recommendations, and caveats that Goffee and Jones provide within their lively and eloquent narrative are all based on rigorous and extensive research. Their purpose is to help those with clever people entrusted to their care to understand what to do and how to do it, and, what not to be and do as well as why. The substantial upside is that clever people "are highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them." In this context, I am reminded of the animators whom Walt Disney supervised who produced Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi; the physicists whom J. Robert Oppenheimer supervised at Las Alamos; the aeronautical engineers whom Ben Rich and Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson supervised at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs (ADP), better known as the "Skunk Works" and those research scientists whom George Pake and Bob Taylor supervised at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Goffee and Jones focus on a number of other supervisors who provided the leadership needed to manage clever people effectively, especially at a time when intellectual capital has become an even more important source of value and when there is an increasing dependence on a small but growing number of clever people. What Goffee and Jones characterize as the "Clever Economy" is not a utopian capitalist idyll. As Tracey Horton told them during an interview, "Highly talented people have the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value. They also have the potential to destroy disproportionate amounts of value." Goffee and Jones identify and discuss a number of common and dominant characteristics of clever people in the first chapter. They suggest to me both the "good news" and the "bad news." For example, they enjoy breaking rules, "suffer heavily from the knowledge-is-power syndrome," resent any review/evaluation process, ask difficult (e.g. politically incorrect) questions, are not impressed by corporate hierarchy, do not want to be led but expect instant access to whomever and whatever they need, and seldom express appreciation. "Even when you are leading them well, clever people may be unwilling to recognize your leadership...Measure your success [as a leader] by your ability to remain on the fringes of their radar. You know you're succeeding when you hear them say you're not getting in the way too much."

There are excellent suggestions about how to lead clever people in Chapter 2. In subsequent chapters, Goffee and Jones shift their attention from leaders and those whom they lead to "Clever Teams" (Chapters 3 and 4) and then "Clever Organizations" (Chapters 5 and 6). I especially appreciate the generous provision of comments by those who have direct and extensive experience with managing clever people. Their observations are based on real-world experience. For example:

"Clever people want to work in an environment of trust. The other thing is, they don't like to be told no. What they respect is if people say no, with an explanation. When it comes to communication from senior management, they are high maintenance. You have to explain more; they don't take yes or no [alone] for an answer." Neil Buckley, ING

"If you go up to these guys and say, `I wish we could do this, but I don't think it's possible!' this is by far and away the best way to motivate them. If I go past and say, `I wish we could do this, but I don't think we can do that, so we're going to have to do this boring thing instead,' in every case, the programmer is up to the task, it's the best way to motivate them. They will spend every waking hour saying, `I bet there is a way to solve it - I know there is a way.' They really enjoy it. It's the thrill of the hunt." Will Wright, EA

The research revealed the reasons why "clever teams regularly screw up." Simply putting clever people does not necessarily make them a team. More often than not, their efforts to collaborate fail. Reasons vary from one Clever Team to the next, of course, but these seem to be the most common causes of problems. First, an inability to agree on common goals. Also, "rarely if ever do they work together interdependently on a shared task." Also, there is almost always "a string drive of clever people to retain their autonomy and independence." Also, clever people tend to become wholly preoccupied with what they are doing...and ignore completely everyone else. Different kinds of Clever Teams encounter somewhat different kinds of problems. Techies have a tendency to be overly specialized and obsessed by their own area of specialization, to the detriment of the team's success. They also have weak interpersonal skills. Members of creative teams can be drawn to novelty at the expense of quality and often do nit see their work in a commercial context. Professional teams (e.g. physicians, attorneys, accountants, and academics) have a tendency to be willfully naughty and can often behave like children. There is also a tendency of professional teams to be "overly concerned or pedantic about setting rules and norms -- something that comes from professional training. Splitting hairs is their modus operandi." Frankly, after reading about all of the different ways that Clever Teams of various kinds have problems, I concluded that managing their members does indeed resemble resembles herding lions and tigers...and doing so while juggling hand grenades in a minefield and wearing a blindfold.

I think this is a "must read" for anyone who has supervisory responsibilities that include managing clever people or who expects to have such responsibilities at some point. To succeed in the Clever Economy, all organizations must not only identify the clever people they need; they must also attract and then retain them with a culture that provides the freedom, the environment, and the necessary discipline they need "to express and develop their talent." To achieve this goal requires a substantial commitment of resources, the most important of which is a quality of leadership that Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones explain thoroughly, indeed brilliantly in this book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creatively Clever Advice, August 23, 2009

By 

Larry Underwood "Author - St Louis Cardinals ... (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People (Hardcover)

In a world filled with not-so-clever people, Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones have provided us with a book geared towards helping us understand what makes clever people tick; and most importantly, how to get the most out of those clever people, by encouraging them & challenging them to reach greater levels of...being clever.

Typically, most organizations are run by somewhat humorless corporate bureaucracies who think they're clever, but usually are far from it. As a result, the truly clever people in those organizations are usually not noticed or under-appreciated; some are even labeled as malcontents & are driven away by narrow minded supervisors.

Such organizations usually experience less than stellar earnings; some even require bailout money to stay afloat. Naturally, most of the clever people have already jumped ship by that time; and so it goes.

The successful organizations embrace the concept that knowledge is actually a good thing to possess and to nurture; naturally, they go out of their way to engage the cleverest people in the process known as "work".

It's really a very simple concept; common sense tell us that. This wonderful book reinforces that concept with very practical strategies which even a CEO should be able to grasp; if they don't let their egos get in the way.