Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People

by Rob Goffee, Gareth Jones

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. The authors explain how to:

• Identify your clever people and their motivations
• Shelter your "clevers" from political distractions that can inhibit their productivity
• Help clevers generate even more value by creating clever teams
• Manage the unique tensions that can arise when clevers work together

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.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction, Management

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I recommend reading this book, yet if you are into specifics and less stories with confusing meaning and importance for the plot - better skip it.

There is one main idea in this book with which I highly resonated with - the new era of organisations is here and it represents organisations of clever, creative and challenging-to-lead people.
There are some useful tips in this book about how to make the leading (not "managing") experience of managers and leaders of teams consisted of clever people, yet somehow I felt a bit lost in the stories and their telling.
The last chapter is about the types of clever organisations and how they manifest themselves and why do they exist, and I consider it to be the best structured chapter in this book. It makes a clear distinction between the types of organisations, their descriptions are on point and culminates with the food-for-thought topic for how leading each of them can be fulfilled.

[Ryan Barretto · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really CLEVER book.

It tells us what to do when we work with really smart people especially if they are smarter than us. It provides great insight into behaviours of organization superstars and how to get them to deliver their best according to the organization's needs. This is done with examples from real organizations and real leaders who have no challenge in stating their difficulties in managing such people.

This is a definite must read for all managers and leaders.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're managing a clever (or maybe are a clever yourself), this would be quite a helpful read. As the authors' definition of a clever, and particularly the way in which these clevers act, is somewhat narrow, I don't know that a lot of managers would benefit from the book. But I picked up some helpful nuggets for management in general, particularly as it relates to anyone who might carry even some of these traits.

[ehsan karimkhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

یکی از بهترین کتابهایی که میتوان در زمینه فهم سازمانهای دانشی و آدمهای خلاق باهوش خواند ،
من ترجمه شهرام خلیل نژاد در نشر دنیای اقتصاد رو خوندیم و باید بگم از حجم محتوای خوب و زبان روان کتاب لذت بردم

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never quite understood the meaning of clever people. However, its a very good guide to managing talent and creating a clever organazation.

[Patrick Neylan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is this the worst business book ever published? I could write all night and still not find enough insults to throw at it, and every one of them justified. It's terrible.

This quivering slab of moist platitudes reminds me of the sort of patronising, vapid nonsense peddled on daytime TV, usually in the name of self-improvement. The glibness and shallowness are astounding, such that I had to stop reading every few paragraphs to scratch my head and marvel that such drivel could ever have got published. The Harvard Business Press won't have much of a reputation if it keeps printing garbage like this.

This is a very 21st Century book: nicely designed, with big print and not too long; full of warm, fuzzy feelings while being devoid of any facts or analysis that might add a grain of grit to the woolly, comfy snugness of starstruck academics nuzzling the egos of preening, self-important executives. Oh yes, you don't think they TALKED to any of the 'clevers' described, do you? That would be too much like hard work. It's like writing a book about life in the trenches and only talking to Lord Kitchener.

Goffee and Jones write like mediocre journeyman journalists. There is nothing incisive in this book; just a bland travelogue of interviews with industry big shots. Their style is, "And then we went to see John Doe who is, like, THE BEST CEO EVER! and he said [insert cliché here] and then we went to see Jim Doe who is, like, THE BRILLIANTEST CEO EVERRR!!! and he said..." etc. I used to be editor of a weekly business title - only 4000 subscribers and paying 180p/1000 words, so we're not talking The Economist here - and this pair aren't good enough to write for that magazine.

Every "insight" is shallow or obvious and teaches us nothing we don't already know about business or management. One is left with the impression of two naïve CEO-groupies who travelled the world and never saw any deeper than the rich pile of the carpet in the CEO's office and never got closer to the coalface than the expensive restaurant where they yearningly stroked the priapism of the executive's ego.

At one end of the spectrum is the rambling Will Wright, inventor of The Sims, who dribbles on like this:

"I'm more like the champion of the design vision. In some senses I'm carrying that flag. Occasionally somebody will come in and say that the flag should be a different color, and we'll have an animated discussion and maybe we will choose to change the color or not. But I'm still the one holding the flag, and when somebody wants to come up and ask about the flag, I'm always the one who knows the current status and I'll be..." OH PLEASE SHUT UP YOU BORING BORING MAN!

Wright, we are told, shifts in his seat but not through discomfort. No? I'd be uncomfortable if the authors had their noses there. The sycophancy is nauseating.

Others, like Sir Martin Sorrell, receive the authors' simpering adulation for such brief, garbled clichés as: "The only reason for this company to exist is to leverage economies of knowledge." No, don't laugh. Alright, go on, laugh. I did. People started giving me funny looks on the train.

When it comes to analysis, we are fobbed off with anecdotes like "the marketing director of a major British brewing company and a great example of a leader with complementary skills". You see, he didn't know much about brewing but he could remember the sales figures off the top of his head, so people took him seriously. "And?" I hear you ask. And nothing. That really is all. I'm not joking and nor (unfortunately) are Goffee and Jones.

This is the sort of twaddle that, far from inspiring clever people ("clevers", as the authors patronisingly call them), has them sniggering behind their hands and playing Buzzword Bingo while the "leader" delivers his webcast about "optimising customer delight" or "leveraging strategic solutions to issues going forward" from his penthouse on one of the moons of Uranus where he has relocated head office for tax reasons.

So what's my qualification for flinging such abuse, however richly deserved?

Well, I did learn a bit about academic research at university and I don't see any here. More importantly, I have been in business for over 20 years and I'm now a publishing director (not in competition with the authors or their publisher) so I know trash when I read it and this is trash. Having been a leader of teams in viciously competitive industries (shipping and publishing) as well as having been (before I grew up a bit) the awkward "clever" about whom this book is written, I can promise you that the authors have no idea about how to handle them/us.

I offer you my guarantee: if you have worked in business for more than six months then you will learn nothing new from this book. Stick with Peter Drucker, whose style the authors sought to copy while forgetting about content.

[Jorge Reyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goffee, me parece, es un sabio de la administración y gestión empresarial. Leerlo y escucharlo demanda total atención y enfoque.
Académico, investigador, autor, ha realizado trabajos en colaboración con varios especialistas del tema de liderazgo, cultura organizacional, cambio y manejo directivo de personas, en este último tema, sobre todo en la dirección de personas creativas y de perfiles altos.
El presente trabajo, además de otorgar bases de liderazgo y administración del talento, inspira y orienta a los involucrados en el factor humano.
Goffee invita al lector a cambiar los paradigmas de la década pasada, que hoy son un lastre para una dirección adecuada de las personas.
Según el autor, se espera de una organización que sabe liderar a personas "inteligentes y creativas" que sepa sobre el empoderamiento de las personas, el auténtico liderazgo, la estructura adecuada, la confianza, la psicología inversa, los continuos retos intelectuales y creativos, etc...
Ampliamente recomendado para toda aquella persona que desee dirigir a personas, equipos de trabajo, innovación e investigaciones, además de aquellos que trabajen con creativos.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful guide to managing clever workers

Clever employees dream up intriguing new products and services, and develop revolutionary processes that catapult their organizations over their competitors. As such, they are crucial to a company’s success. However, as consultants Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones explain, leading them can be a huge challenge. Manage them too much, and they will leave and take their brilliant ideas to your competitors. Manage them too little, and they may waste precious corporate resources on impractical activities that do not contribute to your bottom line. In this thoughtful, illuminating book, Goffee and Jones describe how to lead them so they will be happy and so your company will benefit. The authors emphasize that cleverness is not everything society makes it out to be, but that, properly managed, clevers can take your organization to the heights, so you want to nurture them. getAbstract finds that this book shows you how, in the cleverest possible way.

[Mark Dongen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Goffey & Jones, when they write together. Having been in lectures of Garath, the story takes on a whole new life, as he is a great story teller. The basis of the book is solid research, I like that the businesscases he uses are companies we can imagine, not unknown ones, but companies to a certain extend symbolic for their products or their brands. This is one of the books that inspired me to do a PhD on Leadership development of high potentials, so I am biassed I will admit.

A very good book, also in comparison to other businessbooks, of which have read a few by now.It is written clearly and easily accessable. Some might say it brings things we 'all know and do'. But then again if we all acted in this way, we would not find this in books anymore. The sad truth is that we treat talents (or smart people)and ther careers rather poor, so there is still a lot to learn from books like this.

[Gerard Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally I am not a fan of management books, but this is interesting...especially if you spend time around artists, designers and other creatives. If you're one of them, you might recognize yourself in the descriptions. If you're working with them, you'll be subconsciously saying, yes, that's so-and-so they're writing about...

[Steve Goodyear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the insights and perspective this book brought for managing clever people. It gave me some insights into how I fit as a clever person on a team or in a workplace, and where the source of some of my frustrations or challenges lay. I found it useful both in looking at my own career and at how to engage with other clever people.

[Denis Korsunov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Authors proclaim the beginning of clever economy era where clever companies will prevail and key source of success of such companies will be clever people (smart, talented, creative individuals capable to create huge amounts of value for their organizations). And leading (not managing) is keystone to unleash of full potential of clever people.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book uses a few companies as case studies. Would have preferred more examples as it can feel pretty stale even though it is focusing on different lessons.

[Jack]

Too focused on academia and leading talented resources in an R&D setting.

[Kevin]

How to deal with bright clever people. Summary at http://greatesthitsblog.com/category/...

[Petr Stedry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book helped me understand my feelings from past manager-employee interactions. The first part resonated very well. The other two parts about teams and organization not so much.

[J. J.]

Helpful in parts. Could be shorter. First third of book on how to lead and manage “clevers” is the most valuable and contains some spot-on insights. Other two thirds can be skipped or skimmed.