Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has penned a terrific piece in the Harvard Business Review.  Here is a link to an excerpt and a link to where you can get the article. 

In classic ‘hit-you-over-the-head’ HBR style, the title of the article is “How Successful Leaders Think.”  Bit over the top in my view, and I nearly passed it over as a result.  I’m glad I tucked in and read it anyway.  Lesson:  never judge an HBR article – including mine – by its sappy title.  <humble apologies to the great editorial team at HBR>

Roger takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote for his premise:  “The sign of the truly intelligent indivdual is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  He points to Red Hat founder Bob Young as an example of how successful leaders use this principle.  In Martin’s account, when presented with the option to pursue one of two prevalent business models – proprietary-software or free-software – Young squashed both concepts together and arrived at Red Hat’s winning free-software-as-fee-service approach. 

Martin suggests that while conventional thinkers focus on obvious relevancy, linear, sequential relationships, and either-or choices, ‘successful leaders’ seek “less obvious but potentially relevant factors” and embrace complexity.  They are more non-linear, see problems in a holistic way, and most important, they turn opposing ideas into completely new directions by changing aspects of each so they can work together.

That sounds to me like the mark of an innovator.  Have a conundrum between two opposing ideas?  Innovators don’t just pick one – they change the rules so that they can get both without compromise. 

The bit that isn’t really discussed in the article, however, is how such a thinker can lead organizations full of people who lean toward simplicity and certainty.  There are many examples of leaders whose complex, holistic, non-linear thinking led them on journeys that lost their people along the way.  Perhaps the article should have been entitled, “How Innovative Leaders Think.”  I’d like to read the follow-up:  “How Innovative Leaders Manage to Stay Innovative Leaders.”

Still, in a world where leaders are expected to sacrifice innovative thinking for black and white (black or white?) decision-making , it’s terrific to see an article that paints innovation as a leadership trait.