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. National sponsorship of Self-Assessment training is provided by the Target Corporation, Target, Dayton's, Hudson's, Marshall Field's, Mervyn's California, and the Target Foundation. Program support is provided by the Mandel Foundation. Join the Drucker Foundation and receive valuable membership benefits.