I was talking with my colleague Jay Weerawardena today about leadership. We agreed that an important aspect of leadership is inspiring people, but also putting people into a position to succeed. That idea fit in very well with Itay Talgam’s TED talk, which was posted:

There are many useful points made in this talk, but the one that resonated most strongly with me is the idea that leadership isn’t about telling people what to do – it is about taking everyone’s talents and creating something together. That proposition is self-evidently true in the orchestras that Talgam uses as examples in his talks, but I also think that this is true in firms. Innovation leadership is about creating things together – which means that management is at least as much about removing obstacles as it is about directing.