The Design Of Business | The Business of Design DB|BD at Aspen: Innovation Requires Collaboration with Professor Linda Hill
No one has better insight on what it takes to lead across space and time than Linda Hill. She has been a professor at Harvard Business School for forty years. Her current title is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative. She’s also started two companies of her own and co-authored three books about leadership. The latest is called Genius at Scale. It’s a guide for leaders on mastering the practice of innovation in a tumultuous time of change using innovative companies like Pixar and Pfizer as case studies.
In this conversation with DB|BD host Ellen McGirt, Linda shares the things that all innovative companies practice, even those with radically different functions: they treat their employees decently, they kill ideas that aren’t working and they don’t see genius as a collaborative venture. She also shares her own experience as an entrepreneur and explains why one of the biggest problems with AI is that we are wayfinding and pathfinding at the same time.
On this season of DB|BD, we are thinking about radical collaboration. Host Ellen McGirt sat down with visionary designers, leaders and thinkers at the 2026 Aspen Business & Society Summit to ask them about the radical act of collaborating with others in a time when it often feels impossible to find common ground.
Visit our site for more on this episode and to view a transcript.