Sungjoo Kim in COLLECTIVE GENIUS: THE ART AND PRACTICE OF LEADING INNOVATION

Sung-Joo Kim, CEO and founder of Sungjoo Group, is honored to have been included in a prestigious new book about business leadership called COLLECTIVE GENIUS: THE ART AND PRACTICE OF LEADING INNOVATION, published by Harvard Business Review.

Written by Harvard leadership scholar Linda Hill with co-authors Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback, this fascinating book demonstrates that sustained innovation requires a special kind of leadership, as exemplified by Sung-Joo Kim and other renowned business leaders.

Linda Hill spent a decade studying leaders of innovative firms in the US, Europe, and Asia, including such companies as Pixar, Google, Volkswagen, IBM, and Sungjoo Group.

Collective Genius captures best practices from global leaders in a compelling and concise manner and demonstrates the opportunity to apply a common business ethos across diverse industries. In chapters that take the reader deep into the worlds of these extraordinary individuals, Collective Genius reveals how they think and what they do to unleash and then harness the “collective genius” of those they lead.

“Innovation is not the domain of one individual in an organization; it occurs where there is empowerment and teamwork,” concludes Linda Hill.

Linda Hill’s words have been echoed by Sung-Joo Kim throughout her illustrious business career, in which she attributes the success of her company to her mission-driven approach. Collective Genius traces Sung-Joo Kim’s unique family background and rise to career success through persistence and extraordinary vision. Rejecting her traditional Korean family’s desire for her not to pursue a career, she overcame myriad obstacles and founded a billion-dollar company that competes with today’s luxury behemoths.

Through her ownership of the global luxury brand MCM, Sung-Joo Kim succeeded in creating a new kind of luxury that symbolized the freedom and empowerment of women. As she states in the book: “I wanted to define a 21st century luxury ? for the stylish working woman who had multiple identities and craved luxurious, high quality products that could help her live a better life.”

Sung-Joo Kim, who grew up in a male-dominated, patriarchal Korea, set out to create an inclusive, welcoming corporate culture, hiring women like herself. “I believed the only way Korea could strengthen its global competitiveness was by waking up its women and equipping them with world-class capabilities.”

She is also a great believer in how overcoming adversity can instil in women an “emotional quotient” that enables them to do great global work. Encouraging open debate and finding ways to bring teams together to collaborate ? and innovate ? are also cited as among the many secrets to her company’s success.

Collective Genius has been awarded the gold medal in the Leadership category of the 2014 Axiom Business Book Awards, the largest and most respected critical guidepost for business books in today`s new world of publishing.

Author Linda Hill gave a TED x talk about Collective Genius and it has had 1,100,000 views in just a few months since it went live on the TED website.

Collective Genius has been translated into four languages with more to come, and has had three reprints.