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This paper offers new theoretical contributions and practical knowledge to existing leadership theories. Through a detailed study of the major corporation SoftBank, a Japanese company achieving business innovation at a global level in recent years, and insights gained on the leadership for organizational adaptability of practitioners driving strategic innovation, this paper presents a framework for 'holistic leadership' with a fractal nature as a complex adaptive system. In the three 'practice layers' of the 'formal organizational layer', 'psychological boundary layer (adaptive space)' and the 'informal organizational layer', practitioners (in the three management layers of top management, middle management and staff) dynamically use 'centralized leadership', 'dialectical leadership' and 'distributed leadership' and combine them depending on the situation, to achieve a balance between various contradictory elements such as the 'tug‐of‐war between efficiency and creativity', and demonstrate organizational adaptability. Through an in‐depth case study, this paper illustrates that holistic leadership in modern companies is a source of business innovation. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new point of view regarding the knowledge management of new product and service development (NPSD), a high-tech field requiring the merging and integration of different technologies and business models. As case studies, we examine the dynamism of the knowledge creation process in NPSD at traditional Japanese telecommunication companies, as they merge and integrate the different elements of broadband wired and wireless network technologies and business models, and we analyse the new knowledge creation process of NPSD in two cases. In a short period of time, strategic teams at the companies formed strategic communities outside the company including customers, and then formed a network that transcended the strategic communities' boundaries. The synthesizing capability of the leadership-based strategic communities comprising community leaders inside the networked strategic communities enabled strategic teams to build new business models aimed at customers and achieved successful NPSD ahead of other competitors. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]