They know perfectly well that their companies need to become more innovative-and they suspect it won’t happen unless they’re willing to push power, decision making, and resource allocation lower in the organization. That’s partly because high-level executives are ambivalent about changing their own behavior. But no fully formed alternative has emerged, either. Nobody has really recommended command-and-control leadership for a long time. And the mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control: The companies function efficiently and exploit new opportunities even as they minimize rules. Employees choose their work assignments and dream up new projects, whose success rests on colleagues’ volunteering to join in-making the companies collective prediction markets. This system allows both companies to be self-managing to a surprising degree. And architecting leaders,near the top, monitor culture, high-level strategy, and structure. Enabling leaders, in the middle, make sure the entrepreneurs have the resources they need. Entrepreneurial leaders, found at lower levels, create new products and services and move their firms into unexplored territory. Both companies, they learned, have three distinct types of leaders. The authors studied two exceptions: the new-product-development stars PARC and W.L. So mature companies often struggle to balance the need for innovation with the need for discipline. But no fully formed alternative has emerged. Nobody really recommends command-and-control leadership anymore.
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