Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People

They tend to obsess over work projects, don't like to be told what to do and need lots of space. They are video-game designer Will Wright, iMac creator Jonathan Ive and Louis Vuitton brand rejuvenator Marc Jacobs. They are the “clevers,” the “highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them.” Goffee and Jones, professors at the London School of Business, present a smart and surprisingly entertaining manual on identifying and handling these employees for optimum benefit, complete with a dos and don'ts chart. They advocate building a corporate culture catering to these individuals—following the lead of Cisco Systems, Nestlé and Google—and argue that the stagnant economy demands creative approaches to inspire productivity: the particular skills of exceptionally gifted workers can be harnessed by entire businesses, creating clever teams and corporations. The book is balanced in its treatment and also explores the flip side of cleverness, making the important caveat: “the clever economy is not a utopian capitalist idyll,” in its illustration of how unchecked and glamorized cleverness contributed to Wall Street's implosion. (Sept.)