Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation
Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild
Harvard Business Review Press (March 2026)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

Whatever its size and nature may be, every organization needs great leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.

Linda Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild wrote Genius at Scale in response to two separate but related questions: “How can leaders inspire in themselves and others the sense of imagination and possibility required for continuous innovation? How can they embolden others to take the risks required to act, rather than plan, their way to develop their way to future?”

They wrote this book in order to help emerging or established leaders to develop or strengthen the skills needed to drive innovation in their organization.

Here are what they characterize as the “ABCs” of leading innovation:

1. The Architect who collaborates, experiments, and learns.
2. The Bridger who curates, translates, and integrates.
3. The Catalyst who maps, seeds, and cultivates.

Great leaders must have the highly developed skills required by each.

Hill, Tedards, and Wild devote a cluster of chapters to each of these three separate but interdependent functions. “The throughline of ABC is development — of oneself and others. Leading innovation “begins with self-awareness and inner alignment.”

To exemplify and authenticate  their abundance of information, insights, and counsel, they strategically anchor them in real-world situations that feature great leaders who demonstrate HOW to drive innovation despite all manner of obstacles. These exemplars contribute some of the most valuable material in the book.

According to Hill, Tedards, and Wild, “Portraits of leaders at the cutting edge in their professions often depict heroic solo figures, eager to maximize their fame and fortune. But the people in this book don’t fit the stereotype. They are masters of cocreation in pursuit of ambitions greater than themselves. They scale their businesses by cultivating deep connections, including with the next generation of talent. Their connections are their glue and grease that have allowed them to transform themselves, their organizations, and the world.”

As you may already know, the Japanese term “kaizen” means “continuous improvement.” James O’Toole once observed that the resistance to change tends to be cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

Linda Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild can prepare you well to help drive innovation in your organization. In essence, the challenge will be to convince others in your workplace culture to improve with cocreation what they do and how well they do it. That is not a destination; rather, an ongoing, never-ending process.

It is not a coincidence that companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable, with the greatest cap value in their business category.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading Genius at Scale: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at-hand,  record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the nature and extent of resistance that the leaders in this book encountered, and to HOW  they responded to it.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.