Collective genius

How can leaders build an organization that is capable of innovating continually over time? By creating a community that is both willing and able to innovate. To be willing, the community must share a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement. When Luca de Meo was Volkswagen's head of marketing communication, he fostered a sense of purpose in his team by asking its members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them; strengthened their shared values by encouraging them to use the brand's three components-innovation, responsibility, and value-to guide their work; and built significant responsibility and autonomy into their rules of engagement. To be able, companies must generate ideas through discourse and debate; experiment quickly, reflect, and adjust; and make decisions that combine disparate and even opposing ideas. Bill Coughran, an SVP of engineering at Google, employed these capabilities both to solve the company's near-term data storage needs and to make progress toward a next-generation solution.