That axiom is a useful entry point to Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation by Linda A Hill, Emily Tedards and Jason Wild. It’s not simply about where innovative ideas come from. The harder challenge is what happens next: how does an organisation take an idea and make it work at scale?
The authors combine research with practice. Hill is a Harvard Business School professor who has studied leadership and innovation for decades, Tedards researches organisational behaviour at HBS while Wild, formerly a Global Vice President at Microsoft, brings a practitioner’s lens.
Building on Hill’s earlier work, Collective Genius, the book argues that scaling requires co-creation: collaborating, experimenting and learning across boundaries.
Three leadership archetypes
The research introduces three leadership archetypes: Architect, Bridger, and Catalyst. Architects create the culture and capabilities that enable people to innovate. Bridgers make connections that would otherwise not happen. Catalysts take those possibilities into wider ecosystems. What interested me is the movement away from the leader as the person with the answer towards the leader who makes other people’s genius possible.The book gets there largely through stories. Its protagonists are not simply success cases; their behaviours give readers something to role-model. Along the way, there are fresh processes and ideas. The recurring use of coaching as an enabler of innovation is particularly refreshing.
Michael Ku, then Vice President and Head of Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer in Groton, Connecticut, is one example. Leadership coaching helped him see that colleagues saw him as directive and that the timing of his speech affected both psychological safety and discussion. Ku began to “speak last.” Under the extraordinary pressure of Covid-19, his team transitioned from thinking like executors to acting like innovators, helping complete vaccine trials in just 266 days. The Architect expressed it through something surprisingly small: when the leader chooses to speak.
Ajay Banga, then CEO of Mastercard, takes the Architect to organisational scale. His vision of “World Beyond Cash” reframed the business narrative, while his 50-25-25 model put resources behind this future. But Banga’s story also intersects with Gary Lyons, one of the book’s ‘Bridgers’, who connected people, ideas and opportunities across boundaries. The relationship is revealing. Scaling innovation is rarely the work of one leadership archetype.
Then there is Kathy Fish, then Chief Research, Development and Innovation Officer at Procter & Gamble, who talks how coaching became part of how experimentation happened. Coaches tracked executives’ statement to question ratio. It exposed how leaders could encourage experimentation while inadvertently shutting it down by judging or supplying answers too quickly. Generative questions such as What did you learn? What do you need to learn next? How can I help? shifted leaders from answer-givers to environment-creators.
The pattern appears again at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. Dr Rakesh Suri, then CEO, used biweekly group coaching with an executive team that often held back opinions. They became trusted sparring partners, reconsidering assumptions, acknowledging what they did not know and eliminating their “silent thought bubbles.” As that behaviour travelled through the hospital, teams began cocreating their own experiments and solutions.
The geography and sectors covered are diverse. It varies from Dubai IFC, where Raja Al Mazrouei’s “The Hive” connected players who helped build Dubai’s fintech ecosystem to Vineet and Anupama Nayar’s Sampark Foundation in India who brings the Catalyst into social impact and goes to Japan’s general-purpose robot project by Avatarin. This breadth indicates innovation beyond Silicon Valley.
The ABC framework is memorable, although real leadership is unlikely to stay within three tidy boxes. A CEO may read it as a book about building systems. Recognising the Bridger’s world of influence without authority might be the takeaway for the manager. While entrepreneurs and social-impact leaders may gravitate towards the Catalyst.
When AI is expanding what individuals can do, the book offers a useful counterpoint. Technology can amplify individual genius. Scaling it is still a truly human endeavour.
Hence the question for a future-ready leader is “What conditions can I create for the genius of others to emerge and scale?”
The reviewer is an Executive & Leadership Coach and Commonwealth Scholar helping organisations build future-ready leaders for an AI-shaped world
Title: Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation
Authors: Emily Tedars, Jason Wild, Linda A. Hill
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Price: ₹1,399 (Hardcover)
Published on September 11, 2026