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Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can’t just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. Although every organization claims to care about innovation, very few are willing to do what it takes to keep their creative people happy, or at least, productive. So what are the keys to engaging and retaining creative employees?

[Here are the first three of seven.]

1. Spoil them and let them fail: Like parents who celebrate their children’s mess: show your creatives unconditional support and encourage them to do the absurd and fail. Innovation comes from uncertainty, risk, and experimentation — if you know it will work, it isn’t creative. Creative people are the natural experimenters, so let them try and test and play. Of course, there are costs associated with experimentation — but these are lower than the cost of NOT innovating.

2. Surround them by semi-boring people: The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them — they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other. That said, you cannot surround creatives with really boring or conventional people — they would not understand them, and fall out. In line with this, recent research indicates that teams made up of diverse members who are open to taking each others’ perspective perform most creatively.

The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. These colleagues will need to pay attention to details, mundane executional processes, and do the dirty work: Messi needs Busquets and Puyol; Ronaldo needs Alonso and Ramos.

3. Only involve them in meaningful work: Natural innovators tend to have more vision, research I’ve done indicates. They see the bigger picture and are able to understand why things matter (even if they cannot explain it). The downside to this is that they simply won’t engage in meaningless work. This all-or-nothing approach to work mirrors the bipolar temperament of creative artists, who perform well only when inspired — and inspiration is fueled by meaning. This rule can also be applied to other employees: everyone is more creative when driven by their genuine interests and a hungry mind.

As novelist John Irving said, “the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me”. At the same time, in any organization there will be employees who are less interested in, well, doing interesting work; they are satisfied with simply clocking in and out, and are incentivized by external rewards. Companies should ensure that trivial or meaningless work is assigned to these employees.

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A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others. In fact, natural innovators are rarely gifted with leadership skills. There is a profile for good leaders, and a profile for creative people — and they are rather different. Steve Jobs had better relationships with gadgets than people, and most Google engineers are utterly disinterested in management. One of the reasons for the rapid plateau of start-ups is that their founders tend to remain in charge. They should learn from Mark Zuckerberg who brought in Sheryl Sandberg to make up for his own leadership deficits. Research confirms the stereotypical view that corporate innovators — intrapreneurs — exhibit many of the psychopathic characteristics that prevent them from being effective leaders: they are rebellious, anti-social, self-centered and often too low in empathy to care about the welfare of others. But manage them well, and their inventions will delight us all.

Editor’s note: We updated the headline on this post April 10 to reflect that its intent is to discuss a small subset of people who happen to be both creative and difficult to work with; not to imply that all creative people are difficult. We regret the error.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in personality profiling and psychometric testing. He is a Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), Vice President of Research and Innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems, and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and New York University. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com. To check out his other HBR articles, please click here.

Image courtesy of Flickr user spike

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Be clear about rules and expectations. Without exception, the adult users who collaborate with the Lego Group have busy lives that involve full-time jobs, studies, hobbies, families and so on. When Lego began collaborating with adult fans, there were very few stated rules or expectations about how the process should work. This led to frustrations on both sides. Fans complained about being asked to consider cost and complexity when developing their designs and to adhere to building techniques that met the company’s tight quality and safety standards. Lego employees complained that adult fans pushed the limits of the company’s rules and regulations and that coordination was difficult because most of the adult fans had full-time jobs and worked on their Lego projects after business hours, at night. Lego learned that it had to be more specific about its expectations upfront, including when its projects would begin and end. The company also learned that adult users were more cooperative when they negotiated expectations with the Lego employees directly involved, rather than with Lego managers who were not directly engaged in the work.

Ensure a win-win. In collaborating with very engaged and skilled users who were contributing their ideas, it was easy for the company to focus on “getting the job done,” forgetting that the users had needs that sometimes diverged from those of Lego employees and that the collaborations themselves needed to be rewarding experiences for the users. Developing a win-win mind-set must be a priority. Lego management learned, as studies of innovators have found, that the intrinsic rewards associated with designing and building products are frequently more motivating than financial rewards.5 Recognizing this, Lego has tended to pay outside collaborators with a combination of experience, access and Lego products. However, users who participate in long-term projects or who provide services that are more like “work” are given a choice: they can receive free products or a more conventional stipend. In business partnerships between Lego and users (for example, in cases such as the architecture project and the sensors), various long-term, fee-based partnership agreements have been negotiated.

Recognize that outsiders aren’t insiders. Lego employees involved with the user community learned early in the process that while participants were indeed committed to the Lego brand and the Lego brick, they were also attracted to the sense of community they experienced with other adult fans. In fact, it is the relationship with other fans and the input and encouragement they offer that strongly motivate these users to keep raising the creative bar and keep searching for new and better ideas and solutions. User communities are not just extensions of the company — they are independent entities. As a result, members should be treated as passionate, experienced and talented individuals.

Don’t expect one size to fit all. Lego also learned early on that different users prefer different modes of communication, and different types of innovations call for different environments. As a result, Lego relies on many different collaboration platforms. The simplest are polls and electronic idea boxes, which allow users to give input on predefined topics. A more advanced platform, Lego Digital Designer, allows users to design virtual Lego models and create digital building instructions that can be shared with other users. It allows innovators with different skill levels to participate.

Be as open as possible. To protect confidential and proprietary information, companies customarily ask collaborators to sign nondisclosure agreements. That’s what Lego did when it launched its Lego Ambassador Program and began collaborating with adult fans. Lego learned two important things: NDAs were effective at preventing the collaborators from sharing information with third parties, but there were unintended consequences. Because Ambassadors took the NDAs seriously, they didn’t share their ideas with other adult fans who hadn’t signed NDAs. Today, Lego uses NDAs more sparingly, to limit information sharing with third parties only in narrowly defined situations — thus ensuring that collaborators are able to interact with each other to the maximum extent. Lego also attempts to maintain transparency in all matters related to collaboration. For example, it posts detailed descriptions of the criteria for and responsibilities of Lego Ambassadors on its own home page and on several community websites. And the company supports community initiatives aimed at improving idea sharing among community members and advancing innovation.

Cumulatively, the principles we have discussed here help Lego organize collaborations with users in a manner that balances the needs of the company with those of its users. These lessons are applicable to other organizations. Instead of regarding collaboration as something that needs to be managed exclusively by the company, it is fruitful to think of it as an ongoing dialogue between two allies. Both sides contribute important resources to a common purpose. Frequently, the two sets of resources complement each other and advance the conversation and collaboration.

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Please click here to read the full article, sign in, buy as a PDF, or create an account.

Yun Mi Antorini is an assistant professor of business communication at Aarhus University, in Aarhus, Denmark. Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. is an associate professor of marketing at DePaul University in Chicago. Tormod Askildsen is senior director of community engagement and events at the Lego Group in Denmark.

Finding your Element is “vital to understanding who you are and what you’re capable of being and doing with your life.”

According to Ken Robinson, what he characterizes as “The Element” is not a physical location but the challenge is to locate it, nonetheless. “It’s about doing something that feels so completely natural to you, that resonates so strongly with you, that you feel as if this is who you really are.” Some people locate it in childhood, others decades later, and still others never. “Finding your Element is a quest to find yourself…it is a two-way journey: an inward journey to explore what lies within you and an outward journey to explore opportunities in the world around you.” Robinson wrote The Element (2009) with Lou Aronica who also assisted with the writing of Finding Your Element four years later. Ever since the first book was published, Robinson explains, “people have asked me how they can find their own Element, or help other people to find theirs.”

In response, this sequel has five main thematic threads that weave throughout the book, each of which is intended to help the reader reflect and focus on finding their own Element and, if they wish to, help others to do so. Robinson provides ideas and principles as well as stories and examples, stories, and other resources such as 15 exercises to complete (more about them in a moment) and clusters of questions to consider at the end of each chapter before moving on to the next. In fact, each chapter title is a question. “Although there are ten chapters in the book, Finding Your Element is not a ten-step program.” Just as Oscar Wilde once suggested, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken,” Robinson suggests that only the reader can answer the questions posed. “In the end, only you will know if you’ve found your Element or if you are still looking for it. Whichever it proves to be, you should never doubt this is a quest worth taking.” True to form, Robinson asks most of the right questions but it remains for each reader to answer them, perhaps using some of the tools that Robinson provides. I have found mind mapping to be an especially helpful technique during both an inward journey of personal discovery and an outward exploration of the world in which I live. As with answering questions, however, each reader must select which tools to use as well as when and how.

These are among the dozens of passages that caught my eye, also listed to indicate the scope of Robinson’s coverage.

o A Personal Quest (Pages xxii-xxiv)
o Three Elemental Principles (19-27)
o True North (27-30)
o Hidden Depths (39-44)
o Finding Your Aptitudes (44-48)
o What’s Your Style? (65-71)
o Two Sorts of Energy (84-87)
o The Unhappy Truth (113-115)
o Having a Purpose, and, What Is Happiness? (117-121)
o The Meaning of Happiness (121-126)
o Seeing Through the Barriers (143-146)
o Who Are You? (147-148)
o A Question of 160-165)
o Figuring Out Where You Are (173-174)
o The Culture of Tribes (191-192)
o Moving Forward by Going Back (215-222)

As I began to re-read this book prior to composing this brief commentary, I realized that amidst all the information, insights, and counsel that Robinson provides in abundances, there were certain key points that I had missed. I strongly recommend re-reading this book, highlighting especially relevant material along the way and then reviewing that material from time to time. I also suggest keeping a notebook near at hand in which to record personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, concerns, and other professional as well as personal issues.

As quoted earlier, Robinson views “finding your Element is a quest to find yourself…it is a two-way journey: an inward journey to explore what lies within you and an outward journey to explore opportunities in the world around you.” This is a never-ending process because each of us and our circumstances change and adjustments must be made to accommodate them.

This is what Ken Robinson has in mind, when concluding: “Like the rest of nature, human talents and passions are tremendously diverse and they take many forms. As individuals, we’re all motivated by different dreams and we thrive — and we wilt too — in very different circumstances. Recognizing your own dreams and the conditions you need to fulfill them are essential to becoming who you can be. Finding your own Element won’t guarantee that you’ll spend the rest of your life in a constant, unbroken state of pleasure and delight. It will give you a deeper sense of who you really are and of the life you could and maybe should live.”

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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If you want to encourage people to take healthy risks, you need to make sure they’re not afraid to fail.

The first step in doing that is defining what a smart failure — a thoughtful and well-planned project that for some reason didn’t work — looks like. Chances are that everyone in your organization knows what success is. Far fewer know what a smart failure is.

o Specify what guidelines, approaches, or processes characterize smart risk taking.

o Provide clear examples of both smart failures and dumb failures and discuss why they’re different.

o Point out what the smart ones have in common, so people know how to structure their experiments.

If you don’t define it, all failure looks risky and that kind of mindset will kill creativity.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “To Increase Innovation, Take the Sting Out of Failure” by Doug Sundheim.

To check out that article and join the discussion, please click here.

Also, you may wish to check out an anthology, Management Tips from Harvard Business Review, by clicking here.

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In the context of seemingly endless challenges, many of us have paused to reassess what it really takes to win. What attributes will we need to overcome the strong headwinds of this hyper-competitive business storm?

We certainly know that the models of the past won’t cut it. To seize our full potential — in both public and private efforts — we must embrace the five new faces of leadership:

1. Sherpa: The leader of a mountain-climbing expedition’s sole purpose is to help others reach the summit. Sherpa leadership isn’t about individual achievement – you are in your role to serve others – your team, your customers, and your community. If your team knows you are there to help them succeed, they’ll give back far more than any rah-rah speech or management technique of the week.

2. Provocateur: Tip-toing around deeply entrenched viewpoints is less productive than trying to fry eggs on a hot sidewalk. Your job is to challenge everything and be a poking-stick of change. A healthy disdain for the status quo is the hallmark of leaders who shape history. Don’t let fear glue you to conventional wisdom.

3. Futurist: Aiming your efforts at last year’s market data will yield a surefire miss. You must clearly articulate your vision of what lies ahead, and ensure your organization is ready to seize it when that window opens. Imagine all the possibilities, and never allow the past or present to restrict your imagination.

4. Story-teller: Getting your message to stand out and be heard above the noise can by tougher than running a four-minute mile. Make sure you’re crafting your story – to both internal and external audiences – in such a compelling way that it cannot be ignored. You must communicate your purpose and a clear plan of how you’ll get there if you expect your team to leap forward with urgency and alignment.

5. Speed Demon: The world of getting things 100% right before hitting the market is long over. Today, you must execute and problem solve with ferocious speed, making regular adjustments in real-time. Complete business cycles can now last weeks instead of years. You must build a culture that embraces speed in all aspects of business – from innovation to customer delivery to hiring to technological advances. On the highway, speed kills. In business, speed wins.

New challenges call for new approaches. To really hit your stride, you’ll need to upgrade your game plan with a modern set of tools.

The surest path to obsolescence is hugging the status quo. It’s time relinquish the techniques of the past in favor of approaches better suited to the challenges of the day. Good leaders may stay the course, but great leaders reinvent.

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Josh Linkner is the New York Times bestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity, named one of the top 10 business books of 2011. Josh is the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. Together with business partners Earvin “Magic” Johnson and NBA team owner Dan Gilbert, Josh is actively rebuilding urban areas through technology and entrepreneurship. He is also Adjunct Professor of Applied Creativity at the University of Michigan. For more information on creativity, visit his website by clicking here.

“In addition to my blog, you’ll find free videos, quizzes, articles, eBooks and more to help fuel your creative fire!”

The power of a voluntary and passionate commitment to a shared purpose

Whatever their source of power (e.g. wind, weather, coal, nuclear fission), the most effective engines throughout human history share common attributes: they are well-designed and conscientiously maintained. Moreover, whenever appropriate, they have been modified. For example, steam power enabled Welch coal companies to remove water from their mines, then remove and transport coal to mills from which steel was transported to harbors at which steam-power ships delivered it to other harbors. The source of power for people is purpose.

John Jantsch makes brilliant use of the engine metaphor when explaining how to formulate a strategy that drives a system that achieve and then sustain a high level of employee engagement and commitment, whatever the size or nature of their organization may be. In other words, a workplace within which employees are what Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba characterize as “evangelists” for the given enterprise. The “commitment engine” really is a process and a system rather than a mechanism.

As he explains in the Introduction, “The businesses that enjoy commitment the most radiate and generate loyalty by awakening the sense of internal purpose first and fo0remost. These businesses then draw from a collection of definable sore characteristics both internally and externally. These same characteristics exist in every business to some extent, but the level of personal intention acts as a potent measure of the degree of commitment one company enjoys over another. These guiding characteristics come to life in the form of habits and define the business through the actions they take when they execute strategy, express culture, and create customer experiences.” Jantsch perhaps channels a comparable insight from Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

These are among the dozens of passages that caught my eye, also listed to suggest the scope of Jantsch’s coverage.

o Meet the “Four Ps” of a Fully Alive Business (Pages 12-17)
o The Characteristics of Personal Commitment (21-25)
o What Our Fears Are Here to Tell Us (34-35)
o The Business Case for Solitude (44-47)
o How to Think Differently (54-56)
o The Alchemy of Purpose (59-62)
o The Core Value Propositions (73-76)
o The Elements of Shared Commitment (97-100)
o Four Stories Every Business Must Build (104-109)
o The Cycle of Getting Important Things Done (131-134)
o Accountability Meetings (145-149)
o The Committed Handbook (158-160)
o Creating a Culture of Shared Ownership (162-168)
o Build Your Community Then Build Your Business (172-176)
o Find Your Unique Framework, and, It’s All About Building More Value (219-221)

It is no coincidence that most of the companies annually ranked among the most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among the most profitable with the greatest cap value in their respective industry segment. All of them are driven by a “commitment engine” that functions effectively at all levels and in all areas of their operation. That is, “a fully alive, commitment-filled business, one in which the customer is, in effect, “a manifestation of everything the characteristics of commitment have to offer. The business becomes fully alive when a customer experiences it through the intentional acts of simplicity, inspiration, convenience, innovation, play, community, and surprise.”

If that does not describe your organization, you and your associates need to read and then re-read John Jantsch’s book. It offers most of the information, insights, and counsel most executives need to establish or nourish and strengthen one.

Photo Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times

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The written word looms over William Zinsser. The many hundreds of books in his Upper East Side apartment stand at attention, as if awaiting instruction from this slight man in a baseball cap and sunglasses who, for a half-century, has coached others on how to write.

In newsrooms, publishing houses and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called On Writing Well, by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser.

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. Zinsser. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

The book, first published in 1976, grew out of a writing course that Mr. Zinsser taught for several years at Yale University. And he is still teaching at 90, holding one-on-one counseling sessions for accomplished and aspiring writers at a round wooden table close to those bookshelves. The only difference is that he can no longer see.

So he listens. Sitting with elbows propped and hands clenched, and with the sunglasses and cap protecting eyes damaged by glaucoma, he listens as students read their drafts and fret over narrative.

“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,” Mr. Zinsser says.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

What follows is an excerpt from an edited version of Warrior’s remarks. Please click here to read the complete article and watch a video of the conversation.

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Connecting everything

We believe that today only 1 percent of what can be connected in the world is actually connected. As an industry, it took us about 20 years to connect 1 percent of the world. And in the next ten years, we believe that number will go up dramatically. We’ll make significant progress in connecting the 99 percent that’s still unconnected. That will be people, that will be devices, and that will be a lot more information on the network.

So when we say “the Internet of Everything,” we mean an intelligent way to connect processes with data and things. Not just the Internet of Things, not just connecting the devices onto the network, but how can you use the information that’s being collected to drive better processes, better decision making for businesses, and better lifestyles for users and consumers? And we mean more efficient ways to analyze that data through analytics from the network—which is our expertise—to make every single vertical (manufacturing, retail, transportation) significantly different than what it is today.

So if I drill deeper into this, one of the things that I think we find to be inevitable is that there will be a lot more connectivity, and there will be two kinds of connectivity. One kind of connectivity will deliver very rich media experiences to us, through video. Video will be much more prevalent than it is today.

There will be another set of data or implications, which is all of these sensors that will connect— not necessarily high bandwidth data, but low bandwidth data, continuous streaming of low bit-rate data. And the patterns in these two kinds of data and applications are going to be very different.

Think about retail, for example, how people shop today. Now, that’s dramatically changed with the mobile platform and the e-commerce platform in the first evolution of the Internet. In the last 20 years, with the Internet, and now more recently with tablets, the data actually now says that people shop more on a tablet than they do on a smartphone or on a PC. And so the commerce and how we make purchases and the shopping experience in the entire retail vertical has changed, and it will continue to change. And how might it change? This is perhaps an example of the “Internet of Things.”

If we can enable location for people, when you walk into the store, we will know which aisle you are going to. We know you were in this aisle, but you didn’t purchase something. And so if we can analyze that data and tell you when there’s a sale going on, that benefits you as a user as well as the retailer. And so that could be an example where there may be sensors. There will be sensors for indoor location (think of it as GPS for indoor location) and knowledge of your preferences.

So it’s really a combination of a recommendation engine, or a preference engine, of a coupon or a discount engine, and a loyalty program, combined with indoor location. So it’s a combination of all these things—which today are very discreet applications—that will make retail a very different experience in the future.

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To read the complete transcript, please click here.

Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco Systems. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Rik Kirkland.

A lean explanation of how to introduce or improve effectiveness of Lean initiatives in almost any organization

In a remarkably informative Introduction, Mark Eaton explains why he wrote this book, briefly reviews the history of Lean dating back (at least) to 1473 and the Venetian Arsenal’s use of a continuous flow manufacturing process to construct an entire ship in less than an hour, and, explains what his narrative provides and how the material is organized. I commend him on introducing each of the chapters with a set of questions to which he responds in the given chapter. He makes clever use of other reader-friendly devices when concluding chapters, such as Figures, boxed “What you need to do,” and “Closing thoughts” sections which will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points later.

Eaton provides a wealth of information, insights, and counsel to help practitioners master the most important Lean concepts as well as the tools and techniques needed to apply them effectively, at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. He also focuses on various Lean concepts as well as initiatives that include “scope” improvement projects, “Value stream events,” management of daily improvement efforts, increasing the quality and extent of engagement of members of cross-functional teams such as those that remove barriers, improve cycle time or reduce first pass yield.

These are among the dozens of passages that caught my eye, also listed to indicate the scope of Eaton’s coverage.

o A brief history of Lean (Pages 3-7)
o Planning a Lean project (12-16)
o Overview of the Toyota Production System (25-32)
o The five principles of Lean (39-48)
o An overview of scoping (56-58)
o Tactics for making scoping easier (83-84)
o Key concepts in value stream mapping (86-95)
o Three-stage value stream mapping (95-108)
o The practicalities of value stream mapping (112-114)
o 3P events: Product and process planning (129-130)
o Managing for daily improvement: everybody, every day (180-185)
o Embedding the change after a Rapid Improvement Event (187-190)
o Creating a culture to support Lean (192-201)
o The behaviours of Lean leaders (201-203)
o Closing thoughts (250-257)

Keep in mind that this is a handbook, not a textbook. For relatively inexperienced with Lean, it offers a rock-solid introduction to fundamentals. For those with extensive experience with Lean, its greatest value will be derived from timely reminders of those fundamentals as well as from what may be different perspectives, points of emphasis, and at least a few do’s and don’ts of which they were previously unaware.

Albert Einstein offers an especially relevant reminder: “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.” By all means eliminate waste wherever it may occur and measure much more accurately whatever you must manage. However, use Lean thinking to identify and cut “fat” but never “muscle.” I congratulate Mark Eaton on the wealth of information, insights, and counsel that he provides. Bravo!

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Photo credit: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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Bryant: Were you always interested in being an entrepreneur?

Subramanian: No. I was not the prototypical 12-year-old who had three businesses. I got to it a little bit late. I spent some time in consulting, and I enjoyed helping people figure out thorny issues. What I missed was actually calling the shots, and building the team and structure and process to execute the plan.

Bryant: What were some dos and don’ts you learned from consulting for other companies?

Subramanian: What struck me was that as companies get larger and larger, the communication gap between folks in the executive offices and people on the ground grows over time. What I’ve seen in some of those situations is a complete lack of trust among decision-makers and their people. So I came away saying that I wanted to create a culture with complete transparency, openness and communication.

Bryant: Where did you get your drive?

Subramanian: There were a couple of key influences. My parents are immigrants. My dad came to this country with a good education, but literally less than $10 in his pocket. And he taught us that, regardless of what you have or don’t have, you can’t let others outwork you.

I think the second influence was where I grew up: Buffalo. It’s a town that’s been hit pretty hard. You get kicked in the teeth pretty good when you come from a place like Buffalo. There was a cohort of us at business school who all grew up in the Rust Belt, and we all sort of bonded. There’s a certain work ethic, a certain attitude, a certain humility.

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.