About the Author — Greg Brandeau was President and COO of MakerMedia. Previously he served as the Chief Technology Officer for The Walt Disney Studios.  He is currently an author, speaker, board member, and management consultant and is engaged in a number of different activities to continue applying his research about innovation, working on the launch of his book, making things, and focusing on his commitment to serve on the boards of organizations doing important work.  Brandeau is also the part-time COO for Chromatik.

Prior to that, Brandeau held the post of Senior Vice President of Technology for Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. He joined Pixar in 1996 as the Studio’s director of Technology. After five successful years, during which he was promoted to Vice President, he left the studio to broaden his expertise within other areas of technology. He returned to Pixar in 2004 and was promoted to Senior Vice President in 2006. In that role, Brandeau was responsible for providing, maintaining, and continually adapting the systems and technology used in creating computer animated feature films that allowed Pixar to continually be on the cutting edge of filmmaking.

Among his other career milestones, Brandeau served as chief information officer for the biotechnology startup company, Perlegen Sciences. His resume also includes a variety of senior level positions in Silicon Valley, including director of Operations at NeXT.

About the Book — "Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot?" You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help–but there's only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to "lead" it–and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don't create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again–an environment where people are both "willing" and "able" to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires.

Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.