Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uoQvceD8OBc
Genius at Scale starts from a complaint Linda Hill heard again and again. Leaders told her their problem was rarely generating ideas. Launching them, commercialising them and getting them to the impact they wanted was where things stalled. So the Harvard Business School professor and her co-authors Emily Tedards and Jason Wild went looking for leaders who had cracked it.
This episode carries a personal story too. Linda’s earlier book, Collective Genius, was handed to Aidan by a boss who had bought twenty copies and never read one. Aidan devoured it over a weekend. The same boss later let him go for starting The Innovation Show, a show built on the idea of sharing the collective genius of great thinkers.
Leading innovation is a different job from leading change
Linda is an ethnographer. She uses the methods of anthropology and tries to study each leader for at least five years. Her first big surprise came years ago, when her dean asked why CEOs could not find enough people to lead innovation.
Leading change means setting a vision, communicating it and inspiring people to follow. Leading innovation asks for something else. The leader invites people to co-create the future, and that rests on three organisational muscles. People collaborate across difference, they experiment, and they learn. Collective Genius was about building those muscles. Its title came from Pixar, where everybody was said to have a slice of genius.
Why Genius at Scale went looking in hostile places
Readers of the first book kept saying the same thing. “I’m not Pixar.” So for Genius at Scale the team deliberately oversampled organisations that research calls hostile to innovation. These were large, multinational, regulated firms, many of them more than a hundred years old.
The manuscript was ready when the pandemic hit. The authors held it back, an agonising decision, because they could see organisations doing things they never believed possible. Around MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotech companies that compete every day built shared ecosystems for testing and safety so their essential workers could keep going. That pattern of partnership beyond one organisation’s walls reshaped the book.
Leading through the fog
Dr Rakesh Suri, then leading Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, spoke with Linda most mornings during COVID. One day he told her, “I feel like I’m leading through a fog. What does it mean to lead when you can’t see, when you have no vision?”
Linda calls this wayfinding, as opposed to pathfinding. A pathfinder knows the destination. A wayfinder treats every decision as a working hypothesis and asks how fast the organisation can learn. Dr Suri told his people, “I’m scared, but I trust you.” His hospital had more than a hundred nationalities, which he treated as a strength. Between 400 and 500 nurses ran A/B experiments to improve their own operations.
The ABCs of Genius at Scale
The architect role builds that culture and those capabilities inside one organisation. Genius at Scale adds two more roles, because scaling usually means co-creating with people outside your walls.
- Architects build the culture and capabilities to collaborate, experiment and learn.
- Bridgers curate, translate and integrate across a boundary with a partner organisation, or between siloed functions and geographies.
- Catalysts map, seed and cultivate a movement of many stakeholders across an ecosystem.
Linda gives two contrasting examples. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI at the top, yet Copilot will only be as good as the bridgers working deep inside both companies. Renault’s CEO faced a wider problem. A great affordable electric car still fails if there are too few chargers, and in Dubai buyers could not get insurance because insurers did not know how to price EVs. So he wrote to EU citizens, seeking a movement across private, public and civil society.
MasterCard and the job nobody wanted
When Ajay Banga became CEO of MasterCard, staff ranked innovation 26th out of 27 factors for the company’s future. Banga asked Garry Lyons to champion the transformation. When Linda teaches the case, almost nobody says they would accept. In one room only 4 of 91 CEOs and C-suite leaders would take the job, even knowing it worked. One explained, “I’ve never failed at anything.”
Garry’s labs ran on eight principles. The first said good ideas can come from anywhere. The last said the labs were enablers and a stepping stone. Garry bridged to the board, to startups and to customers, and MasterCard went on to provide the rails for Apple Pay and Android Pay.
Be nice to your bridgers
Bridgers do invisible work. When it succeeds, the parties they connected say “we got this done”. When it fails, the bridger takes the blame. Everybody knows who the bridgers are, so everybody leans on them until they burn out. Linda’s closing advice is simple. Be nice to your bridgers, and build careers that zigzag across functions so more people learn the craft.
Win a copy of Genius at Scale
Two books sit on Linda’s desk behind her, over to the left on YouTube. Tell us their colour in the YouTube comments or by replying to the Thursday Thought and you go into the hat for a copy of Genius at Scale, with thanks to Kyndryl.
About the Guest
Linda A. Hill is a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the world’s leading researchers on leadership and innovation. She is co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation and Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press) with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild. Read her article on why continuous modernisation demands more than technology change at the Kyndryl Institute.
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan.
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. Discover thought leadership from many Innovation Show guests at the Kyndryl Institute.
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Frequently asked questions
What is Genius at Scale about?
Genius at Scale by Linda Hill, Emily Tedards and Jason Wild studies leaders who scale innovation inside large, established and often regulated organisations. It extends Collective Genius with the ABC framework, showing how Architects, Bridgers and Catalysts help ideas get launched, commercialised and delivered with real impact.
What are architects, bridgers and catalysts?
Architects build a culture where people collaborate, experiment and learn. Bridgers curate, translate and integrate work across a boundary, such as a partner company or a siloed function. Catalysts map, seed and cultivate movements across whole ecosystems. Linda Hill says bridger and catalyst roles are often held by middle managers.
How is leading innovation different from leading change?
Linda Hill’s research found that leading change relies on a vision and followers. Leading innovation relies on co-creation. The leader invites people with different expertise to collaborate, experiment and learn together, so the organisation can keep innovating instead of depending on one visionary.
What is wayfinding in leadership?
Wayfinding is leading when the destination is unclear. Pathfinding assumes you know where you are going. Wayfinding treats each decision as a working hypothesis and focuses on how fast the organisation learns from feedback. Linda Hill uses it to describe leading through uncertainty, from COVID to AI.
Why do bridgers burn out?
Bridgers do behind-the-scenes work that others rarely see. When a partnership succeeds, the connected parties take the credit. When it fails, the bridger takes the blame. Because everyone knows who the bridgers are, colleagues overuse them. Linda Hill’s advice is to recognise and protect them.
Who is a keynote speaker on innovation and change in Ireland?
Aidan McCullen is a Dublin-based keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change. He is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, host of The Innovation Show and author of Undisruptable. He works with leadership teams across Ireland and internationally.