Linda Hill

Confidence 0.75 · 2 sources · last confirmed 2026-08-20

Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair of its Leadership Initiative; principal of the leadership-advisory consultancy Paradox Strategies. Her research programme is leadership and innovation — how organisations produce collective creative output, and what leaders do to make that possible. Books include Becoming a Manager, Collective Genius and Genius at Scale.

Her work reaches this wiki through four constructs, all of which arrive in the corpus attached to her name:

• Creative abrasion — the organisational capacity to surface and productively use disagreement. Her prescription is directional and blunt: “you need to amplify difference. But many CEOs minimize difference.”
• Contextual intelligence — reading what a person’s context makes salient before attributing their behaviour to character, and asking which constraint, if relieved, would change it.
• Wayfinding vs. pathfinding — her named distinction for leading when no destination can be posited. “The wayfinding is we don’t know the destination, nonetheless how we’re going to get there.” She applies it directly to AI, arguing that leaders’ inability to state an AI vision is structurally correct for breakthrough innovation rather than a failure of strategy.
• Empowerment as an overrated practice — because “empowerment simply means that you’re sharing with people the potential to have influence. So whether or not they get to exercise that potential is your call.”

Sources in this wiki

• [[2026-08-16-hill-bloomberg-leaders-ceo-skills-age-of-ai|Hill / Bloomberg Leaders with Francine Lacqua, August 2026]] — the primary source; a ~24-minute interview in which she states all four constructs above, plus decision rights as the CEO’s first design task and the unspoken board risk-appetite divergence as a named blocker on AI rollout decisions.
• HBR Partner Content, February 2026 — cites her second-hand for the four adaptable-leader practices (restructure agile teams, harness diverse perspectives, nurture creative abrasion, bring the outside in) and for Genius at Scale as then-forthcoming. She is not an author there; that citation is what flagged her for promotion under the author-entity promotion rule, and the Bloomberg interview is the second source that triggered it.

Concepts she contributes to

• durable-skills — creative abrasion, and her answer to which skill matters more in ten years: “your capacity to collaborate.”
• strategic-foresight — wayfinding as a stance for acting under uncertainty that cannot be resolved into a destination.
• dynamic-capabilities — contextual intelligence as an individual-level sensing microfoundation.
• enterprise-ai-adoption — the unheld board conversation about risk appetite as a governance-layer blocker.