Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Chapter 46

Jazz vs. Symphony

John S. Clarkeson

This chapter was first published in 1990. It remains one of our most popular Perspectives to this day.

Is there a leadership crisis? Are we really lacking executives to inspire and lead our organizations into the twenty-first century? Or are the specifications for the job changing? Should we reexamine what kinds of leaders our organizations need?

The critical function in today's organization is the creative function. As change accelerates, organizations that are not continually recreating their reason for existence will not survive for very long. Business leaders must inspire this ongoing creativity by harnessing the knowledge and thinking abilities of many people with different and highly specialized skills.

Whether a business is driven by the need to increase variety, segment the market more finely, cope with shortening life cycles, harness the possibilities of new process technologies, or reposition against new competitors, the key task is to lead the organization to create products, processes, and services that have not existed before.

Routine work can eventually be broken down into individual, repetitive, and ultimately unchallenging tasks. In fact, most of our companies derive from a model whose original purpose was to control creativity. The key advantage of Ford's assembly line was that each man did one job the same way every ...