Deep Smarts:How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom

Inside your company are people whose knowledge and expertise are vital to your firm’s success and even its survival. They can quickly size up complex situations. They can recognize patterns that others don’t see. And they can make wise decisions that lead to good results.

What enables these individuals to produce such value is not simply a high IQ or a unique talent, but deep smarts: a potent form of experience-based wisdom that drives both organizational competitiveness and personal success.

In our summary of the new book Deep Smarts, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap provide penetrating insight into the relationships among knowledge, competitive advantage, and continuous innovation.

What sets deep smarts apart and makes them so valuable is that they are built on first-hand life experiences, resulting in tacit knowledge that is hard for other firms to copy.

But, as Leonard and Swap explain, this transfer barrier is precisely what makes deep smarts such a challenge to manage inside organizations.

Leonard is the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School. Swap is Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Tufts University. Together they wrote the best-selling book When Sparks Fly and are well known for their work on innovation and creativity.

Based on their multi-year research project observing and interviewing coaches and protégés in start-ups and mature firms, they reveal how deep smarts can be cultivated and leveraged across the entire company. They also pin down this elusive quality and provide a step-by-step framework for developing it and transferring it.

Knowledge transfer will become an increasingly important topic as the baby boom generation retires. This summary challenges every manager to develop deep smarts actively in the next generation of leaders. The future of your organization just may depend on it.