Our open meritocracy has bred and nurtured innovative people with new ideas. Leaders in all sorts of organizations want desperately to encourage creative, innovative persons. Innovation is a form of change. For the most part our culture welcomes change, but people proposing it do, as you might expect, run into barriers. As our society has become more complex, we find important segments of it becoming larger, more structured, more bureaucratic, less nimble, and less hospitable to unusual persons.
Leaders can resist hardening of the arteries.
But leading creative people in this age of diverse work arrangements and electronic relationships requires leaders themselves to be thoughtfully innovative. The secret, I believe, lies in how individual leaders in a great variety of settings make room for people with unusual and creative gifts and temporarily become followers themselves. Creative persons stand out from the rest of us. Somehow their contributions affect large groups and move organizations toward something better. Yet they function, for the most part, outside of or away from organizations.