I’ll bet you know a natural leader. Maybe you are one.

Maybe you’re a mom who started a support group for the parents of children with special needs.

Maybe you’re a concerned citizen who mobilized a group of preservation-minded neighbors to halt the destruction of a venerable old building.

Maybe you’re a churchgoer who convinced some of your fellow parishioners to help mentor at-risk kids.

Or maybe you simply organized your company’s first softball league.

In business, we talk a lot about leadership, and often take pains to differentiate between “leaders” and “managers.” Usually, this dichotomy hinges on the “vision thing.” Leaders imagine a future state and a chart a course to get there—they’re change agents. Managers simply preside over the status quo—they’re administrators.

While this distinction is useful, it doesn’t go far enough. Leaders in traditional organizations usually derive a large share of their power from their positions—that’s the case for CEOs, cabinet officers, and high school principals. In other settings, a leader’s power may reflect the freely given support of peers and followers—examples include Mother Teresa, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

There is a distinction, then, between...

At one time or another, most of us have probably worked for a boss who was self-absorbed, vindictive, or just plain inept — a real-life equivalent to Dunder Mifflin’s Michael Scott. One of my first jobs was for an HR manager who thought the best way to humble a cocky new MBA was to have him spend hours sorting files into alphabetical order. Needless to say, he didn’t get the best out of me or anyone else that worked for him.

During the recession, companies around the world have cut costs in all the usual ways—by reducing headcount, slashing capital budgets, and trimming overheads. All these measures are vital. But in their quest to root out inefficiencies, companies should also be focusing on the hidden but substantial costs of supercilious and overbearing bosses.

A global survey of 90,000 employees by Towers Perrin , conducted in 2008, revealed that only 21% of employees are highly engaged in their work. The other 79% may be physically on the job, but they’ve left their enthusiasm and ingenuity at home. This is a scandalous waste of human capability. It’s also a virtually bottomless reservoir of creative potential that has yet to...

One of the key tasks of management is coordinating activities--making sure the right people are working on the right projects at the right time. Most companies default to a top-down allocation system: people are put on projects according to availability, favouritism, or sometimes, pure luck. That's reasonably efficient, but the result is some lucky folks get all the exciting projects, some get stuck on a project-from-hell forever, and some never get a chance to prove themselves.

Some companies, such as Eden McCallum , the London-based strategy consultancy, have experimented with a virtual-company model in which they act as the brokers between freelance project staff on one side and clients on the other. It's a clever approach, but it provides no guarantee of work for the freelancers; and it is hard to scale, because it relies on the team in the middle making a high-quality match between freelancer and client.

Another option is often called the "internal market," sitting somewhere between the traditional and the virtual models. On paper, the internal market sounds attractive: it combines the efficiency of the top-down model with the fluidity and sensitivity to employee needs of the virtual model....

So much of the leadership conversation centers around the question “how do I get more out of my people?” I don’t think I’ve been at a conference or sat in on a conversation with business leaders where the subject—and that exact phrase— hasn’t come up.

Now, without a doubt, bringing forth the full ingenuity, initiative, energy, and passion of every person in the organization is one of the most urgent agenda items for leaders in every realm of endeavor. But when it comes to unleashing the best gifts of people, that mechanistic metaphor of extraction ( “how do I get more out?” ) and, more importantly, the approaches it engenders, quickly break down.

Which is why it’s so refreshing to encounter a leader who brings an entirely different mindset (and vocabulary) to the challenge of shifting from an organizational model designed to generate rote productivity to one designed to yield genuine creativity, discovery and breakthrough (and to support human flourishing in the process).

Ivy Ross , our newest MIX Maverick, has been tackling that challenge with powerful results in a range of organizations for three decades. A veteran design executive who has...

One of our goals here at the MIX is to discover and celebrate the ideas and initiative of in-the-trenches management innovators—wherever they come from. While it's always energizing to watch those ideas and stories pop up on the site, it's especially rewarding to encounter these dedicated change makers in person. We had the chance to do that recently during a celebration of our HCI Human Capital M-Prize award . It was such fun swapping ideas and hearing about how our MIXers are changing the game when it comes to supporting human flourishing inside organizations (and beyond), that I caught a bit of the conversation on video.

Here are four short takes from some of the Human Capital M-Prize finalists/winner. (And by the way, we'd love to hear more from all of you via video. You can easily upload videos in the HACK and STORY templates—if it's a compelling video, we'll be sure to promote it on the home page and circulate it widely in all of our channels.)

Meet Lisa Haneberg and learn about her Talent Management Cloud

This ambitious and...

If you are a regular reader of the MIX, you probably already have a point of view on the future of management. Indeed, the MIX was created to help accelerate the evolution of management, so chances are you have already bought into the argument that we are going through a period of upheaval that will transform the way we work in organizations in the years ahead.

I hope and believe this argument is right. And in future blog posts on this site I will discuss examples of some of the changes in management that are currently underway. But let me develop a contrarian line of argument first, before offering a synthesis.

Here's the problem with all this talk of virtual and networked organizations, and this vision of empowered and engaged employees. We see the massive changes underway in technology and connectivity, and we assume that these changes will drive change in how we work. The trouble is, previous generations went through the same process. In the late 1990s, commentators talked about the emergence of the ICE age, where ICE was an acronym for "the Internet Changes Everything." In the early 1980s, the business world was...

One of the most interesting themes of MIX content in the year since we launched has been the role of technology in management innovation, especially social networks. Mavericks and MIXers alike have made made the argument that the effects of Web 2.0 technologies on the organization and the people in it are huge -- not minor changes to the way we work, but revolutionary changes to the way we view work.

For example, employees who have grown used to the meritocracy, the ease, and the capabilities available to them on the consumer web are impatient with organizations that can't perform at that same level. Want to create a new service or show off an accomplishment? It takes only a few minutes to do that on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or the hundreds of sites that host various services on the cloud, from team collaboration to email services and product prototyping. So why should it take weeks or months to accomplish something similar in a rigid organization?

The most innovative workers won't sit still for IT and the rest of the organization to catch up. They'll move on to create it on their own or for another organization that can...