Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

14.4. Managing Creative Fusion

One of the challenges to managing creative fusion is that experts have to work together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust, or else heat rather than light will be the result. In the case of our Silicon Valley start-ups, the coaches have to respect the fact that these barely postpubescent entrepreneurs have some expertise too. They actually have years of experience with precursors of the Internet, with playing and modifying video games, with programming, and with their immersion in a culture of on-line exchange. Years from now, their current expertise will prove to have been shallow as society grows an entire new on-line ecology, but today they know as much as anyone about this evolving world. And for ...