Adam Grant on 'How Non-Conformists Move the World': Insights from Book 'Originals'

our guest today is Adam grant a management professor at Wharton and we're going to talk to him about his new book originals which is about how non conformists move the world Adam welcome to knowledge at Wharton thank you the you often interview authors in the author's at Wharton series so I'm gonna start with a question that you usually ask them what inspired you to write this book I really want to turn the tables on you on this one I think the inspiration for writing this book was twofold one I worked as a manager for a while before I came into academia and the one time I could worked up the courage to speak up I was actually dragged by my boss's boss into the bathroom and I basically ended up being threatened that I would be fired if I ever spoke my mind again and I really wanted to know how could I have done that more effectively and then more recently since my first book give and take came out people have been constantly asking if I am in a culture where people are constantly selfish or toxic how do I change that and if I'm piercing undesirable circumstances anywhere what do I do about them and I didn't feel like I had good answers for them so I started doing a lot of research and here we are so you talk about entrepreneurship right at the beginning of the book especially the company Warby Parker which you know came out of the efforts of some Wharton students and typically when people think about entrepreneurs they see them as the ultimate risk takers who are willing to bet the farm on their dreams what is your view of entrepreneurship and the relationship between entrepreneurship and risk-taking well that's what I thought too initially right when I thought of an entrepreneur I thought of like you know sort of a swashbuckling pirate or a daredevil the kind of person who had basically leapt before he or she looked and the data tell a completely different story that entrepreneurs are not necessarily more risk-taking than the rest of us in fact they may even be more risk-averse most entrepreneurs hate gambling what they really enjoy is the opportunity to try something new and they're typically driven not by this craving for risk but rather this desire to say can I pursue a passion can I work independently can I do something where I'm really gonna have an impact and so what I think what mystifies a lot of us is we look at entrepreneurs and we see them taking risks and we assume they're risk takers really what a lot of them are doing is they're managing risk portfolios so think about it like a stock portfolio right if you're gonna make a risky investment in one realm you're supposed to offset that with a safer bet in a different stock and entrepreneurs actually do the same thing with risk at least the successful ones do when they have to go out on a limb in one domain they will actually be more cautious in another to cover their bases you also have so many interesting stories in the book one that I especially liked was about the internet browsers that people use does that say anything about the people who used them and about their originality it says more than I initially expected so this economist Michael husband was tracking data and customer service reps and call center employees and he found that employees who use Chrome or Firefox actually outperformed Internet Explorer and Safari users and they also stayed in their jobs significantly longer so I started stalking him of course to find out why what's going on what is Chrome and Firefox do for you and it turned out it wasn't a technical advantage it was not that they were faster at typing they didn't have more computer knowledge it was about how you got the browser if you are going to use Internet Explorer Safari it comes pre-installed on your computer right whereas Chrome and Firefox if you want them you have to take a little bit of initiative and download a different browser and that's a signal a window around what you do at work so the kinds of people who had that instinct to say you know what I wonder if there's a better browser out there they were also the kinds of people who looked for ways to improve their own jobs and ultimately they were able to create a job where they were more effective and more satisfied now people hear about these data and sometimes they say well wait if I want to get better at my job all I have to do is upgrade to Chrome or Firefox right it's about the kind of thinking that that underlies that choice not just accepting the default that's handed to you but asking is there a different or a better option available in thinking about originality you say the biggest barrier to originality is not the ability to generate ideas but to select them how can people avoid making bad bets when it comes to idea selection I think we're all actually pretty terrible at this when it comes to our own ideas is overwhelming there you it's hard to find an entrepreneur who doesn't think his or her idea is a winner it's really other people's feedback that turns out to be important so there's this brilliant research by Justin Berg one of our former doctoral students who's now in the Stanford faculty and Justin got circus artists to try to gauge how likely their performances were to succeed with audiences and they were terrible they overestimated the success of their own performances by a lot so then he went to managers and he showed a bunch of videos so you get to see some jugglers you get to see a few clowns by the way nobody likes clowns it turns out universally hated you may get to watch a few aerial acrobatics performances and then the managers make judgments and the managers are not very accurate either you tend to be too positive on your own ideas managers tend to be too negative on other people's ideas because they have a prototype about what a great circus performance looks like and they're evaluating all the ideas that come onto the table in terms of does that fit or not and the group that was much more effective than either people themselves or managers was Pearce fellow circus artists so you might not be able to judge your own ideas but you're great at forecasting the success of other people's ideas because unlike managers as a performer you're much more willing to look at an unusual act and say you know what I've never seen anything like that before but that has potential but you also are willing to say you know this is really bad so I think we could all rely more on peer feedback and do a better job saying look when I've got a new idea I'm not necessarily going to trust my own judgment but I'm not always going to trust especially middle managers who's tend to be the most risk-averse and most conservative I'm gonna go to people who are fellow creators right you have a couple of great examples of from the business world of segue and Seinfeld in demonstrating can you tell us a little bit of those examples yeah I think the the Segway example is a case unfortunately of an entrepreneur being overconfident and an idea so the short version of the story is you have this idea for a self-balancing vehicle and you don't really go out and figure out this is something people would want to drive would they trust it would they buy it whereas in Seinfeld you have the exact opposite instead of sort of a false positive it's a false negative so the pilot was rated weak and it was actually initially scrapped and then this this movie executive excuse me TV executive Rick Ludwig who doesn't even work in comedy he's from the variety and specialist department he sees the pilot and he says this is really good and he ends up finding a slot for it and using his own budget and I think what Rick did was he was able to step outside of the prototypes that a lot of us tend to use so people looked at the Seinfeld pilot and they said it's a show about nothing and this does not fit the mold of how a comedy or sitcom especially is supposed to run whereas Rick had come out a variety specials lots of different formats and he said you know what not every plot has to be resolved not every twist needs to go somewhere the point is to make people laugh and he was much more open to the potential there so does that mean that when it comes to idea generation that quantity is very closely related to quality yeah I think one of the myths that people carry around if you want to be original you will think look I should do less because I want to perfect my invention or my creation but again the data actually support the opposite story dean Simonson's a psychologist has been studying this his whole career and what he finds is one of the best predictors of how much creative productivity you will ultimately achieve how much you're regarded as a genius is about the number of ideas you produce so the more ideas you create the more variety you have right and some of those ideas are going to be blind alleys or random walks and bad directions but you have a better shot than of stumbling upon something that's really powerful so for example when you compare great composers if you look at Beethoven Bach Mozart it wasn't that their average is so much better than their piers it's that they generated sometimes six hundred or a thousand different compositions and a few of those are considered true masterpieces you can see this not just when comparing different kinds of people though you can also pick it up when you look within a person's career so creators are the most novel the most original during the times when they have the most bad ideas look at Edison for example great example Edison made a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only children but adults too he came up with a fruit preservation technique that failed he tried to mine in a number of ways that didn't work out and it was during that window where he had a over a hundred failed ideas that he was able to perfect the light bulb and I think the idea is that you have to generate a lot of garbage to reach greatness what are the challenges that anyone who comes up with a new idea who's going to face is how do you get them hard and how do you speak truth to power can you give us some examples of how you can do that while minimizing the risk of damaging your career as you felt at the start of our conversation I could have really used this crisis back I think one of the the most important things that I've learned about speaking truth to power is that when we're excited about an idea we tend to make the mistake of assembling as many reasons as possible to support it and by the time we pitch it it seems as if were completely biased and blinded right it's all this is a good idea and there's no balance whatsoever and the pitch so there's an entrepreneur Rufus Griscom who has a great antidote to this he starts a company called Babel it's a parenting website and he goes to investors and he says these are the three reasons you should not back my company and that year he walks away with over three million dollars us in funding two years later he goes to Disney and says you know I interested in selling this company to you here are the five reasons why you should not buy it and they end up buying it for forty million dollars now of course part of this it's a little bit of an attention-grabbing device right you don't expect an entrepreneur to say here's why you should not trust me but what's interesting is when rufus acknowledges the weaknesses of his idea he looks like he's self-critical and honest and he also makes it harder for people to come up with their own objections because as they're thinking about their own concerns they say you know what he hit three of my four this guy must be so confident that he can overcome these issues he's willing to admit those weaknesses that loud and those strengths must be powerful enough to offset them so I think we can all do a better job probably giving a more balanced case for our ideas when we speak truth to power the other thing that I would I would recommend is to avoid a mistake that I made which is when I went to speak up in my own career I looked for the friendliest most agreeable person assuming that's the person who's ultimately going to be supportive but it turned out that that person didn't have my back because just as he was interested in being nice to me he also wanted to keep the peace with everyone else what I should have done and what the evidence supports is that if you go to a more disagreeable boss somebody who tends to be a little bit more critical skeptical and challenging yeah that person is going to be tougher on you but then they will be also more willing to rock the boat a little bit and stand up for your idea if it's unpopular is it the right time to exit an organization rather than continuing to make the case for our idea I think this is a problem that a lot of us struggle with I don't know that I have any answers to it I do know though that if you track what happens to most people who speak up usually they try voicing their idea and then if it doesn't work out they either decide you know what I don't have other options and I need to keep this job or they start to look elsewhere I think they're a couple of tests though that are worth running before you decide to leave the first one is have I gone to all of the potential allies that I have in the organization second one is is it possible that there's a better way for me to present this idea and that it's not that people are unwilling to hear and it's just that they didn't see the potential because I didn't speak about it effectively and then third and most importantly the question is what am i altima trying to accomplish is this organization the best site for me to reach my goals and I think if you can answer those three questions mm-hmm I can't succeed on any of them it's probably time to stir looking around a little bit well sometimes people procrastinate about some of these things and you'll have some interesting ideas about procrastination in your book if you see procrastination or strength or as a weakness my stance on this has completely changed part partially during the process of writing the book so I expected if you want to be an original you know the kind of nonconformist to champions new ideas and really drives creativity and change in the world I thought you had to be an early bird a first mover but again the evidence proved me wrong turns out that most originals are great procrastinators they're constantly putting things off and actually a former student gia Shen who showed that if you procrastinate a little bit you will generate more creative ideas than if you dive right into a task or finish it right away and the reason for this is pretty simple and I've actually been a victim of the opposite of it for a while so I am actually a procrastinator I'm somebody who if I know I have something doing six months I will feel urgent pressure to do it now and worry about it constantly until the moment that it's done and when I noticed as I compared that against the originals that I studied the people that I interviewed the data that I gathered was a lot of them we're waiting for the right time and if they put off the start or completion of the task a little bit they allowed themselves to access more diverse ideas and they saw possibilities that I wouldn't have seen because our first ideas are our most conventional typically right you have to sort of weed out the familiar in order to get to them much more unusual and original and I wasn't doing that when I drove right into a task so I've come to believe we should all procrastinate deliberately but if you push that too far of course you're just not gonna have time to finish your work I think of strategic procrastination as essentially this idea of waiting for the right time so as a writer for example I have learned to leave drafts unfinished on purpose and what I will do is I'll start working on a draft I really want to spend the next two hours finishing it I will put it away and then three days later when I come back I have seven or eight new ideas that I would never have considered because now it's in the back of my mind we have a much better memory for incomplete than complete tasks so the moment I sort of hit Send on that on that draft it's out of my mind right whereas when I leave it open then I'm constantly processing it I'm seeing new possibilities the other thing I've learned to do over time is I'll finish a draft but I won't actually submit it or ship it and I'll leave it sitting for two or three weeks by the time I come back to it I have enough distance to say who wrote this drivel but I also then again are able to approach it with a fresh perspective and for me about so Associated Press procrastination is all about I mean especially in writing when you say something at the heat of endo and in the heat of the moment and the heat of writing you don't have enough distance to be objective about it but exactly by waiting I got very similar advice from one of my early editors in my career and I've always appreciated that I think it's wonderful advice as long as we find that sweet spot right of procrastinating enough to allow the ideas to incubate but not so much that you run out of time and you just have to pick the simplest idea exactly no Einstein believed that people are most creative when they are young is that true it seemed to be true for Einstein but not for most of the rest of us so the story behind sign is actually pretty sad if you look at it so transforms physics not once but twice with the special and general relativity and then he ends up opposing the next major revolution in physics which is quantum mechanics and ironically his opposition to it is debunked because he forgot to account for his own theory of relativity whoops so I'm the I'm Stein said reflecting on this experience that to punish him for for testing and challenging Authority the fates made him a thought an authority himself and I think that suggests that at some point we were all doomed once we've internalized ideas to essentially lose our creativity when you study though great scientists musicians poets artists what you see is that there are basically two cycles one is basically is sort of the young genius and this is the Einstein somebody who comes into a fee accumulates knowledge really quickly but also has enough distance to not drink the kool-aid and that person ends up with a flash of insight coming up with a wildly different way of looking at the worlds and yeah if that's your style you're at risk for becoming too entrenched and starting to take for granted so many assumptions that you can't really think differently in that field anymore but there's a second path which was the old master and these are the people who tended to work much more experimentally they were doing lots of little trials and errors they were doing tests they were iterating and they were learning from the data as opposed to having these Eureka moments and they actually tended to peak frequently in their 40s 50s 60s even 70s and 80s in some cases so I think there is hope for those of us who are more tortoise than hare how can originality be sustained at what time I think one of the challenges that we all face if we want to sustain originality is we have to keep our exposure to fresh ideas and the longer you spend in a field and organization a job the more familiar certain things will become and so you have to push yourself outside of that comfort zone how do you do that there's a study I really enjoy by Frederick Godard and his colleagues where they actually track fashion designers and they look at what predicts which fashion houses have the most creative and original designs and it turns out one of the best predictors of that is has the creative director of that fashion house lived abroad but then if you break down the data it goes further living abroad alone is not enough you have to work abroad you actually have to use the ideas of the culture right not just sort of visit and enjoy it as a tourist you have to internalize how that culture thinks and looks at things differently and then working abroad you can break that down further and say it's more beneficial for your creativity and originality if you work abroad in countries that are more different from your own if you and if you stay there longer so that kind of breadth is what we're looking for how do you simulate that I think what a lot of us can do is we could do a much better job with the job rotation for example so in your own organization two days doing a job that you've never done before gives you a completely fresh perspective on the work go do a site visit to a different organization or even a company that's in a different field from your own different industry and all of a sudden you have lots of ideas that you can apply to your own work what rule do coalition's play in bringing original ideas to life we all need allies it's very hard to be alone original I think Derek Siver's put it well one follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader and nobody wants to be that lone nut I think many of us though assume that we need large coalition's to support our ideas but most the time research by our own Segal bar said shows that even a single ally a single friend is enough to make you feel that you're not lonely and so I think coalition's typically are much more about finding that very very small group of people who believe in you and are willing to give your ideas a shot as opposed to saying I need to get 74% of this organization on board you also talk about something called a Trojan horse strategy for coalition building what's that well this was introduced to me by Meredith Perry who's a brilliant entrepreneur she's the founder of you beam which is trying to bring Wireless power to the world and when Meredith started her company she had this idea that you could actually transmit transmit electricity through the air and power up different kinds of devices phones computers without any kind of cord and people didn't believe her she tried to hire the very best engineers because she couldn't build the product on her own and they said that's impossible it defies the laws of physics she was convinced that they were wrong so in order to get them to come on board she changed her pitch to them instead of saying I'm trying to build wireless power can you make me this kind of transducer she just said I'm trying to build a transducer can you make me this part and she actually disguised her purpose because it was too radical for most people to understand and then a bunch of Engineers came on board and she was able to work with them to make it happen and what she did was she smuggled her real vision in that case inside a Trojan horse right she's really trying to build a wire power but she has a bunch of people working on different pieces that ultimately will come together for a different outcome than they intend and I think the more radical the more original your idea is the more important it is to make sure that people aren't dissuaded by the end and instead focus them on perhaps a more moderate goal that they think is plausible does originality have roots in family that's oh for example does but order matter in originality it matters more than I expected going in there's a huge debate about birth order and I would say the jury is still out overall but there is compelling evidence that firstborns on average tend to be a little bit smarter and a little bit more likely to achieve conventional success in fields like politics and science we have more elected officials who are first born for example we also have more nobel prize-winning scientists however when it comes to originality completely changing the way that a field operates or introducing a new technology there does appear to be a later born advantage and I think there are a couple of reasons for that one is that later borns are given more freedom so by the time you know you have three or four older siblings you're allowed to do a lot of things that they weren't allowed to do growing up and you get to take some risks the other thing that happens is some of the more conventional achievement niches are filled so you know you may have an older sibling who's this academic star and one who's an athlete and you need to find other ways to differentiate herself and one of those can be creativity III was interested in tracking this as you know with comedians so I took Comedy Central's list of the hundred greatest stand-up comics of all time which had some great originals people like Chris Rock George Carlin Jerry Seinfeld and I studied their birth order and found that they were more than twice as likely to be born last in their families as first and the odds of that happening by chance alone are two in a million so I think there there is perhaps an advantage for later borns and originality as a firstborn I was not excited by this research but the good news is that birth order effects are not set in stone right so giving children the kinds of freedom encouraging them to find unique Nisha's to express themselves I think can push all of us even us for sports in a more original direction so I wonder if you could talked about that in a little more detail how can parents nurture more originality among their children well I think role models play an important part of this process so what a lot of children do is they become unoriginal because they've only been exposed to models or standards who are very familiar and conventional right so children grow up they see lots of engineers doctors lawyers teachers and they say that's what I wanted you to as parents we can open up more original niches by exposing children to a much wider variety of occupations careers ideas and some of the most original possibilities are not going to exist yet which is why when you listen to what some of the great originals in the technology world say they will frequently identify their inspiration in science fiction books like Ender's Game now we're probably going to see more Harry Potter references when we ask the next generation of entrepreneurs what inspired you but it's amazing how many inventions come out of fictional stories and I think we could do a much better job making sure that children are exposed to lots of ideas that don't exist yet so that when they see for example the next generation of somebody using what looks a lot like a mobile phone in a 1960s Star Trek episode they say you know what I want to go out and create that the new consent of families or even companies one of the biggest problem seems to be groups Inc how does that come about and how can you prevent it a lot of people attribute groupthink to cohesion they think that if we're too close if we trust each other too much Mukul of you and I like each other too much then we're not going to challenge each other that turns out to be false cohesive groups often make the best decisions and people frequently when they trust each other are willing to challenge each other and say yeah I know this person is not going to take this too personally but if you're not careful cohesion can take you down a path toward groupthink when people become more concerned about politics and about maintaining their relationships and reputations then about speaking their mind and being honest so most leaders try to combat this by assigning devil's advocates I know that there's a majority preference in the room so I'm going to assign one person to be the the opposite doubles advocates according to the research don't work very well most of the time Charlaine Nemeth at Berkeley has been studying this for over four decades and what she shows is devil's advocates make two mistakes one is they tend to give lip service to an idea but they don't really believe in it so they don't sell it secondly when devil's advocates speak people know they're just playing a role right I don't need to take you seriously okay I pretended to advocate for this position and now we can go back to the majority preference instead of assigning a devil's advocate I think what we all need to do is unearthed a devil's advocate genuine dissenters people who actually hold the minority opinion we need to find those people we need to invite them into the conversation and give them a voice and what's so powerful about that is it turns out minority opinions are useful even when they're wrong so let's say we're gonna hire one of four candidates and almost everybody in the room prefers candidate a and candidate B is really the best one if someone comes in and advocates for candidate C we will have a better shot at choosing ultimately the right candidate of B because when divergent information comes to the table were much more likely to reevaluate our assumptions consider new criteria and make a better decision to just conclude this fascinating conversation I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how organizations can create a culture of nurturing originality if you can offer some practical advice originality thrives as opposed to being stifled there are a couple things to do one is you have to make it safe for people to fail you have to make it okay for ideas to come up that don't go anywhere because if you squash all the bad ideas you're gonna miss out on some of your most original possibilities a second step that turns out to be really critical if you care about originality in your organization and especially if you want it to be a core part of the culture is you have to think differently about hiring a lot of leaders hire on culture fit they say look I want people who share our values who match the culture and that's actually a recipe for groupthink you hire a bunch of people who look at problems in the same way who have the same opinions the same principles I do the design firm has I think a compelling alternative to this they say look we're gonna throw a cultural fit out the window instead we look for cultural contribution so when we hire we're not looking for people who are going to replicate or clone the culture we're going to find people who enrich the culture and the test of that is to figure out what's missing from your culture and then try to bring in people who can who can embody that and then the I think the third thing to do if you want to build a culture of originality is you need to challenge the status quo a lot you need to get people as Bob Sutton at Stanford would say feeling comfortable being uncomfortable and one of my favorite ways of doing that is from Lisa beaudelet future think she actually runs this kill the company exercise where she brings leaders together and has them spend maybe an hour CEO brainstorming ways to put their own company out of business now I've seen this done and financial services and pharmaceutical companies and I've never seen executives so excited this when they finally get to to trash their own employer but what's interesting about it is it shifts their mindset because they start to think about instead of playing defense and protecting themselves against competitive threats they're on offense and they get to try all these new possibilities and drill into them and then after that when they shift back to thinking how do I defend against these threats they have much more creativity at their disposal so I think that's a good example of shaking things up a little bit and thanks so much for speaking with knowledge at Wharton today thank you you

Channel: Knowledge at Wharton

Views: 41,911

Keywords: Originals (Book), Entrepreneur, Innovation, Interview, Non-Conformist, Wharton

Id: Nt2_QFezLmU

Length: 30min 58sec (1858 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2016