You always know when you are in a Hot Spot. You feel energized and vibrantly alive. Your brain is buzzing with ideas, and the people around you share you’re and excitement. Things you’ve always Known become clearer, adding value becomes more possible. Ideas and insights others miraculously com-bine with your own to create new thinking and innovation. When Hot Spots arise in and between companies, they provide energy for exeploiting and applying knowledge that is already known genuinely exploring what was previously unknown. Hot Spots are mar-velous creators of organizations and wonderful, life-enhancing phenomena for each of us.

Lynda Gratton has spent more than ten years investigating Hot Spots-discovering how they emerge and how organizations can cre- ate environments where will proliferate and thrive She has studied dozens of compa-nies and talked to hundreds of employees, managers, and executives in the US Europe, and Asia She has asked the important ques-tions: Why and when do Hot Spots emerge? What is it about certain groups of people that support the emergence of Hot Spots? What role do leaders play? She’s discovered a host of elements that together contribute to the emergence of Hot Spots –creating energy and excitement, and supporting and channel-ing that energy into productive outcomes.

In this groundbreaking book, Gratton describes four crucial qualities that an organi-zational culture must have to support the emergence of Hot Spots, looks at what lead-ers can do to encourage them, and offers activities and tools you can use in your own company to increase the probability of them arising. In these days when traditional organi-zational boundaries are becoming barriers to progress, Gratton offers advice and guidance that you can use right now to increase the probability of Hot Spots emerging in your organization.

Lynda Gratton is Professor of Management Practice at London Business School where she directs the school’s executive program, “Human Resource Strategy in Transforming Organizations. ”She is the author of The Democratic Enterprise, Living Strategy, and Strategic Human Resource Management. Ste has twice been named one of the world’s top management thinkers in The Times of London.