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When Mark Shapiro took over as the general manager of the Cleveland Indians a little over a decade ago, he brought a mentality to the post that echoes the approach of some top business leaders as much as it does top baseball minds. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton , Shapiro--now team president of the Indians--discusses his efforts to build a sustainable product on the baseball diamond through making a series of individual decisions that stay true to his overall vision of what long term success for the Indians requires. He makes some interesting points about leadership and management that extend across sectors:

For those executives who have not convinced themselves they have all the answers, strong leadership depends in part on utilizing the collective wisdom of all members of an organization. At Fast Company , Fort Hill President Michael Papay outlines some best practices for using crowdsourcing techniques to tackle organizational challenges. One tip is to " Create a Great Experience ": The quickest way to get to some fast answers is to make the experience a good one, perhaps even delightful. Time compresses when we’re engaged. The trouble is: Most survey methods are too cumbersome and too dreaded because the experience is dry and usually awful. What if you engaged people--perhaps even delighted them--in the process of asking them questions? This is less about driving people to do a survey, and more about the experience pulling them into a process where they see where others are, contribute, and shape direction. Facebook and other social media took off when the experience was simple and when people knew they’d learn something as they participated. And, in the process, those experiences created “stickiness”--the idea that people are drawn to return for more. In fact, the dominant social media sites--Facebook and Twitter--each ask simple questions to prompt posts and tweets: What’s going on and what are you doing? How about something that’s a good experience for the users--a crowdsourcing tool that engages the crowd and people see they can shape the opinion of a company? The process is transparent--people can see what others are doing. You get more engagement and you compress the time. Read Crowdsourcing Your Way to More Effective Leadership here .

Christian Busch bills his company, Sandbox , as "the leading global network for the most inspiring innovators below 30." And it is based on the premise that young entrepreneurs want to "do well while doing good." It is a difference, he says, of the model put forward by previous generations where the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Gates take on philanthropic endeavors after they have had their success. In this Harvard Business Review Insight video, Busch speaks about the challenges and opportunities in creating an organization in which financial success and value to society are not treated as separate endeavors:

London Business School Professor of Management Practice Lynda Gratton studies organizational behavior and human resources. She argues, that in the digital age, one's value is now based "not only the knowledge you have in your own head, but the collective knowledge of the networks that you maintain." And there are three types of networks that matter, Gratton says. 1. The modern posse; 2. The regenerative community; and 3. The big idea crowd. Gratton describes these networks in a helpful Harvard Business Insight video:

In a Harvard Business Insight video, Robert Austin --dean of the business faculty at the University of New Brunswick--shares a remarkable story of a company building an extraordinary workforce. The Danish company Specialisterne has built a practice of hiring people with autism and training them to test software. And Austin says they are "the best software testers in the world." The lesson here is not about the capacity of people with autism to become top employees (even though that is an important lesson). Rather, Austin shares this story to make a point about talent. Some of the most talented workers might be "idiosyncratic" and less appealing in standard hiring processes. But a failure to examine the potential for these people is equivalent to, Austin says, "leav[ing] talent on the table."

Innovation isn't coming up with new ideas out of the blue. Innovation is about solving problems. So Clay Christensen advises that we spend time with our problems. Get to understand why certain problems keep on slowing us down--or rather our keep our organizations from reaching our goals. When we find "problem patterns," then we can truly innovate, as Christensen explains in this Harvard Business video:

If you're looking to the animal world for guidance on how to be an effective leader, you might want to avoid the big, bold aggressive beasts out there and consider the swan. Gill Rider , president of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development says the most effective leaders are swan-like. They are calm, and they always seem to know exactly where they are going and what they are doing. Rider shares an anecdote to make her point about authentic leadership in this Harvard Business Insight video: