00:00:02
Our Guest today is Adam grunt a management professor at Wharton and we're going to talk to him about his new
00:00:08
book Originals which is about how non-confirmed the world Adam welcome to knowledge at Wharton thank you so you
00:00:16
often interview authors and the authors at Wharton Series so I'm going to start
00:00:22
with a question that you usually ask them what inspired you to write this book I really want to turn the tables on
00:00:28
you on this one but I think the the inspiration for writing this book was uh twofold one uh
00:00:37
I worked as a manager for a while before I came into Academia and the one time I
00:00:42
worked up the courage to speak up uh I was actually dragged by my boss's boss
00:00:47
into the bathroom and uh I basically ended up being threatened that I would be fired if I ever spoke my mind again
00:00:54
and I really wanted to know how could I have done that more effectively and then
00:00:58
U more recently uh since my first book give and take came out people have been constantly asking if I am in a culture
00:01:05
where people are constantly selfish or toxic how do I change that and if I'm
00:01:10
facing undesirable circumstances anywhere what do I do about them and I didn't feel like I had good answers for
00:01:15
them so I started doing a lot of research and uh here we are great so you you you talk uh about entrepreneurship
00:01:22
right at the beginning of the book uh especially the company warie Parker which you know U came out of uh the
00:01:30
efforts of some Wharton students uh when typically when people think about entrepreneurs they see them as ult the
00:01:37
ultimate Risk Takers who are willing to bet the farm on their dreams uh what is your view of Entrepreneurship and the
00:01:44
relationship between entrepreneurship and risk-taking well that's what I thought too initially right when I
00:01:49
thought of an entrepreneur I thought of like you know sort of a swashbuckling pirate or a daredevil the kind of person
00:01:54
who had basically leap before he or she looked and the data tell a completely different story that entrepreneurs are
00:02:01
not necessarily more risk-taking than the rest of us um in fact they may even be more risk averse most entrepreneurs
00:02:08
hate gambling what they really enjoy is the opportunity to try something new and
00:02:13
they're typically driven not by this craving for risk but rather this desire
00:02:17
to say can I pursue a passion can I work independently can I do something where I'm really going to have an impact and
00:02:24
so what I think what mystifies a lot of us is we look at entrepreneurs and we see them taking risks and we assume
00:02:30
they're Risk Takers really what a lot of them are doing is they're managing risk
00:02:34
portfolios so think about it like a stock portfolio right if you're going to
00:02:37
make a risky investment in one realm you're supposed to offset that with a safer bet in a different stock and
00:02:43
entrepreneurs actually do the same thing with risk at least the successful ones do when they have to go out on a limb in
00:02:48
one domain they will actually be more cautious than another to cover their basis now uh you also have so many
00:02:55
interesting stories in the book uh one that I especially liked was about the internet browsers that people use does
00:03:04
that say anything about the people who use them and about their originality it says more than I initially expected uh
00:03:11
so this economist Michael hman was tracking data on customer service reps and call center employees and he found
00:03:17
that employees who use uh Chrome or Firefox actually outperformed Internet Explorer and Safari users and they also
00:03:25
stayed in their job significantly longer so I started stalking him of course to find out why why what what's going on
00:03:30
what does Chrome and Firefox do for you and it turned out it wasn't a technical
00:03:34
Advantage it was not that they were faster at typing they didn't have more computer knowledge it was about how you
00:03:40
got the browser if you were going to use Internet Explorer Safari it comes pre-installed on your computer right
00:03:46
whereas Chrome and Firefox if you want them you have to take a little bit of initiative and download a different
00:03:50
browser and that's a signal a window around what you do at work so the kinds
00:03:55
of people who had that instinct to say you know what I wonder if there's a better browser out there they were also
00:03:59
the kinds of people who looked for ways to improve their own jobs and ultimately
00:04:03
they were able to create a job where they were more effective and and more satisfied now people hear about these
00:04:08
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
00:04:13
Firefox no right it's about the kind of thinking that that underlies that choice
00:04:18
not just accepting the default that's handed to you but asking is there a different or better option
00:04:24
available now in uh thinking about originality uh you said the the biggest barrier to originality is not the
00:04:32
ability to generate ideas but to select them uh how can people avoid making bad bets when it comes to idea selection I I
00:04:42
think we're all actually pretty terrible at this when it comes to our own ideas
00:04:46
right the evidence is overwhelming there you it's hard to find an entrepreneur
00:04:49
who doesn't think his or her idea is a winner um it's really other people's
00:04:54
feedback that turns out to be important so there's this brilliant research by
00:04:58
Justin Berg uh one of our former doctoral students who's now on the Stanford faculty and Justin got circus
00:05:03
artists uh to try to gauge How likely their performances were to succeed with audiences and they were terrible um they
00:05:10
overestimated the success of their own performances by a lot so then he went to managers and he showed a bunch of videos
00:05:18
so you get to see some jugglers you get to see a few clowns by the way nobody likes clowns it turns out universally
00:05:23
hated um you may get to watch a few aerial acrobatics performances and then the managers make judgments
00:05:30
and the managers are not very accurate either um you tend to be too positive on your own ideas managers tend to be too
00:05:36
negative on other people's ideas because they have a prototype about what a great
00:05:41
circus performance looks like and they're evaluating all the ideas that come out of the table in terms of does
00:05:45
that fit or not and the group that was much more effective than either people themselves or managers was pierce fellow
00:05:52
circus artists so you might not be able to judge your own ideas but you're great
00:05:56
at forecasting the success of other people's ideas because like managers as a performer you're much more willing to
00:06:02
look at an unusual act and say you know what I've never seen anything like that
00:06:06
before but that has potential but you also are willing to say you know what this is really bad so I think we could
00:06:13
all rely more on pure feedback and do a better job saying look when I've got a
00:06:18
new idea I'm not necessarily going to trust my own judgment but I'm not always
00:06:22
going to trust especially middle managers who tend to be the most risk averse and most conservative I'm going
00:06:27
to go to people who are fellow creators right and you have a couple of great examples of uh from the business world
00:06:34
uh of segue uh and Seinfeld uh in in demonstrating this can can you tell us a little bit about those examples yeah I
00:06:41
think the the segue example is is a case unfortunately of an entrepreneur being overconfident in an idea uh so the the
00:06:49
short version of the story is you have this idea for a self-balancing vehicle and you don't really go out and figure
00:06:56
out is this something people would want to drive would they trust it would they buy it whereas in Seinfeld you have the
00:07:02
exact opposite instead of a sort of a false positive it's a false negative so
00:07:07
the pilot was rated weak and it was actually initially scrapped and then this uh this movie executive excuse me
00:07:14
TV executive uh Rick lwin who doesn't even work in comedy he's from the variety and specialist Department he
00:07:20
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
00:07:27
I think what what Rick did was he was able to step outside of the prototypes that a lot of us tend to use so people
00:07:33
looked at the Seinfeld pilot and they said it's a show about nothing and this
00:07:36
does not fit the mold of how a comedy or sitcom especially is supposed to run whereas Rick had come out of variety
00:07:43
specials lots of different formats and he said you know what not every plot has to be resolved not every twist needs to
00:07:50
go somewhere the point is to make people laugh and he was much more open to the potential there so does that mean that
00:07:56
when it comes to idea generation that quantity is very closely related to Quality yeah I think one of the myths
00:08:03
that people carry around if you want to be original you will think look I should
00:08:08
do less because I want to perfect my invention or my creation but again the data actually support the opposite story
00:08:16
uh Dean Simonson's a psychologist who's been studying this his whole career and
00:08:19
what he finds is one of the best predictors of how much creative productivity you will ultimately achieve
00:08:25
how much you're regarded as a genius is about the number of ideas you produce so
00:08:30
the more ideas you create the more variety you have right and some of those ideas are going to be blind alleys or
00:08:37
random walks in bad directions but you have a better shot then of stumbling upon something that's really powerful so
00:08:45
for example when you compare great composers if you look at Beethoven Bach Mozart it wasn't that their average is
00:08:51
so much better than their peers it's that they generated sometimes 600 or a thousand different compositions and a
00:08:58
few of those are considered true masterpieces you can see this not just when comparing different kinds of people
00:09:03
though you can also pick it up when you look within a person's career so creators are the most novel the most
00:09:10
original during the times when they have the most bad ideas look at Edison for example great example Edison made a
00:09:17
talking doll so creepy that it scared not only children but adults too he came up with a fruit preservation technique
00:09:23
that failed he tried to mine um in a number of ways that didn't work out and
00:09:28
it was during window where he had over aund failed ideas that he was able to perfect the light bulb and I think the
00:09:35
idea is that you have to generate a lot of garbage to reach greatness right no one of the challenges that anyone who
00:09:42
comes up with a new idea is going to face is how do you get them heard and how do you speak truth to power uh can
00:09:50
you give us some examples of uh how you can do that uh while minimizing the risk
00:09:56
of damaging your career as as as you at the start of our conversation I could have really used this advice a while
00:10:04
back I think one of the the most important things that I've learned about speaking truth to power is that when
00:10:10
we're excited about an idea we tend to make the mistake of assembling as many
00:10:15
reasons as possible to support it and by the time we pitch it it seems as if we're completely biased and blinded
00:10:23
right it's all this is a good idea and there's no balance whatsoever in the
00:10:27
pitch uh so there's an entrepreneur Rufus grisk who has a great antidote to this he starts a company called Babble
00:10:34
it's a parenting website and he goes to investors and he says these are the three reasons you should not back my
00:10:41
company and that year he walks away with over $3 million Us in funding two years
00:10:46
later he goes to Disney and says um you know I'm interested in selling this company to you here are the five reasons
00:10:52
why you should not buy it and they end up buying it for $40 million now of course part of this it's
00:10:58
a little bit of an ATT grabbing device right you don't expect an entrepreneur
00:11:01
to say here's why you should not trust me but what's interesting is when Rufus
00:11:06
acknowledges the weaknesses of his idea he looks like he's self-critical and
00:11:10
honest and he also makes it harder for people to come up with their own objections because as they're thinking
00:11:16
about their own concerns they say you know what he hit three of my four this guy must be so confident that he can
00:11:22
overcome these issues that he's willing to admit those weaknesses out loud and
00:11:26
those strengths must be powerful enough to offset them so I think we could all do a better job probably giving a more
00:11:31
balanced case for our our ideas when we speak truth to power the other thing that I would I would recommend is to
00:11:37
avoid a mistake that I made which is when I went to speak up in in my own career I looked for the friendliest most
00:11:43
agreeable person assuming that's the person who's ultimately going to be
00:11:47
supportive but it turned out that that person didn't have my back because just
00:11:52
as uh he was interested in being nice to me he also wanted to keep the peace with
00:11:56
everyone else what I should have done and what the evidence of reports is that if you go to a more disagreeable boss
00:12:02
somebody who tends to be a little bit more critical skeptical and challenging yeah that person is going to be tougher
00:12:07
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
00:12:13
unpopular interesting uh when is it the right time to exit an organization rather than continuing to make the case
00:12:21
for a idea I think this is a a problem that a lot of us struggle with I don't
00:12:26
know that I have any answers to it um I do know though that if you track what happens to most people who speak up
00:12:33
usually they try voicing their idea and then if it doesn't work out they either
00:12:37
decide you know what I don't have other options and I need to keep this job or
00:12:41
they start to look elsewhere I think there are a couple of of tests though that are worth running before you decide
00:12:47
to leave the first one is have I gone to all of the potential allies that I have
00:12:51
in the organization second one is is it possible that there's a better way for
00:12:56
me to present this idea and that it's not that people are un willing to hear
00:12:59
it it's just that they they didn't see the potential because I didn't speak
00:13:02
about it effectively and then third and most importantly the question is what am
00:13:07
I ultimately trying to accomplish is this organization the best site for me to reach my goals and I think if you can
00:13:13
answer those three questions I can't succeed on any of them it's probably time to start looking
00:13:19
around a little bit well sometimes people procrastinate about some of these things uh and you have some interesting
00:13:27
ideas about procrastination in your book book do you see procrastination as a strength or as a weakness my stance on
00:13:33
this has completely changed uh part partially during the process of writing the book so I expected if you want to be
00:13:39
an original you know the kind of non-conformist who Champions new ideas and really drives creativity and change
00:13:46
in the world I thought you had to be an early bird a first mover but again the evidence proved me wrong turns out the
00:13:54
most originals are great procrastinators they're constantly putting things off
00:13:59
and I actually had a a former student G Shin who showed that if you procrastinate a little bit you will
00:14:06
generate more creative ideas than if you dive right into a task or finish it right away and the reason for this is
00:14:12
pretty simple um and I've actually been a victim of the opposite of it for a
00:14:15
while uh so I am actually a precrastinator I'm somebody who if I know I have something do in six months I
00:14:22
will feel urgent pressure to do it now and worry about it constantly until the moment that it's done and when noticed
00:14:29
as I compared that against the originals that I studied the people that I interviewed the data that I gathered was
00:14:36
a lot of them were waiting for the right time and if they put off the start or completion of the task a little bit they
00:14:42
allowed themselves to access more diverse ideas and they saw possibilities that I wouldn't have seen because our
00:14:47
first ideas are our most conventional typically right you have to sort of weed out the familiar in order to get to the
00:14:54
much more unusual and original and I wasn't doing that when I dove right into
00:14:57
a task so I've come to believe we should all procrastinate deliberately um but if
00:15:01
you push that too far of course you're just not going to have time to finish
00:15:04
your work what is strategic procrastination I think of strategic procrastination as essentially this idea
00:15:11
of waiting for the right time so as a writer for example um I have learned to leave drafts unfinished on purpose and
00:15:19
what I will do is I'll start working on a draft I really want to spend the next
00:15:22
two hours finishing it I will put it away and then 3 days later when I come back I have seven or eight new ideas
00:15:28
that I would never considered because now it's in the back of my mind we have
00:15:32
a much better memory for incomplete than complete tasks so the moment I I sort of
00:15:36
hit send on that on that draft it's out of my mind right whereas when I leave it
00:15:42
open then I'm constantly processing it I'm seeing new possibilities uh the other thing I've
00:15:48
I've learned to do over time is I'll finish a draft but I won't actually
00:15:51
submit it or ship it and I'll leave it sitting for two or three weeks by the
00:15:56
time I come back to it I have enough distance to say who wrote this driil but but I also then again I'm able
00:16:03
to approach it with a fresh perspective and for me that's what strategic procrastination is all about I mean
00:16:08
especially uh in in writing when you say something at the heat of in the in the in the Heat of the Moment In the Heat of
00:16:14
writing uh you don't have enough distance to be objective about it but exactly by waiting it uh I got very
00:16:20
similar advice from one of my early editors in my career and I've always appreciated that I think it's wonderful
00:16:26
advice as long as we find that sweet spot right of procrastinating enough to allow the ideas to incubate but not so
00:16:33
much that you run out of time and you just have to pick the simplest idea exactly now Einstein believed that uh
00:16:40
people are most creative when they are young is that true it seemed to be true for Einstein um but not for most of the
00:16:48
rest of us uh so the story of Einstein is actually pretty sad if you look at it so transforms physics not once but twice
00:16:56
with special and general relativity and then and he ends up opposing the next major revolution in physics which is
00:17:02
quantum mechanics and ironically his opposition to it is debunked because he forgot to account for his own theory of
00:17:10
relativity whoops um so Ein Einstein said reflecting on this experience that to punish him for uh for testing and
00:17:19
challenging Authority the fates made him athor an authority himself and I think that suggests that
00:17:25
at some point we are all doomed once we've inter IED ideas to essentially lose our creativity um when you study
00:17:34
though great scientists musicians poets artists what you see is that there are basically two cycles um one is basically
00:17:43
sort of the young genius and this is the Einstein somebody who comes into a field
00:17:47
accumulates knowledge really quickly but also has enough distance to not drink the Kool-Aid and that person ends up
00:17:55
with a flash of insight coming up with a wildly different way of looking at the world and yeah if that's your style
00:18:01
you're at risk for becoming too entrenched and starting to take for granted so many assumptions that you
00:18:07
can't really think differently in that field anymore but there's a second path
00:18:11
which was the old master and these are the people who tended to work much more experimentally they were doing lots of
00:18:17
little trials and errors they were doing tests they were iterating and they were
00:18:20
learning from the data as opposed to having these Eureka moments and they actually tended to Peak frequently in
00:18:26
their 40s 50s 60s even 70s and8 in some cases so I think there is hope for those
00:18:32
of us who are more tortoise than hair um how can originality be sustained over time I think one of the the challenges
00:18:44
that we all face if we want to sustain originality is we have to keep our exposure to Fresh
00:18:48
ideas and the longer you spend in a field an organization a job the more familiar certain things will become and
00:18:57
so you have to push yourself outside of that comfort zone how do you do that there's a a study I really enjoy by
00:19:02
Frederick uh Godard and his colleagues where they actually track uh fashion designers and they look at what predicts
00:19:09
which fashion houses have the most creative and original designs and it turns out one of the best predictors of
00:19:15
that is has the creative director of that fashion house lived abroad but then if you break down the data it goes
00:19:23
further living abroad alone is not enough you have to work abroad you actually have to use the ideas of the
00:19:28
the culture right not just sort of visit and enjoy it as a tour a tourist you have to internalize how that culture
00:19:34
thinks and looks at things differently and then working abroad you can break that down further and say it's more
00:19:40
beneficial for your creativity and originality if you work abroad in countries that are more different from
00:19:45
your own if you and if you stay there longer so that kind of breath is what we're looking for how do you simulate
00:19:52
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
00:19:58
organization and spend two days doing a job that you've never done before gives
00:20:02
you a completely fresh perspective on the work go to a site visit to a different organization or even a company
00:20:08
that's in a different field from your own different industry and all of a sudden you have lots of ideas that you
00:20:13
can apply to your own work uh what role do coalitions play in bringing original ideas to life we all
00:20:20
need allies it's very hard to be a lone original I think Dereck civer put it
00:20:25
well uh one follower is what trans forms a lone nut into a leader and you know no nobody wants to
00:20:34
be that lone nut I think many of us though assume that we need large coalitions to support our ideas but most
00:20:41
of the time researched by our own Seagal barade shows that even a single Ally a single friend is enough to make you feel
00:20:49
that you're not lonely and so I think coalitions typically are much more about
00:20:53
finding that very very small group of people who believe in you and are willing to give your ideas as a shot as
00:20:59
opposed to saying I need to get 74% of this organization on board um you also talk about something
00:21:07
called a trojan horse strategy for Coalition building what's that well this was introduced to me by Merith Perry uh
00:21:15
who's a a brilliant entrepreneur uh she's the founder of ubeam which is trying to bring Wireless power to the
00:21:20
world and when Meredith started her company she had this idea that you could actually transmit transmit electricity
00:21:27
through the air uh and and power up different kinds of devices phones computers uh without any kind of cord
00:21:33
and people didn't believe her she tried to hire the very best Engineers because
00:21:37
she couldn't build the product on her own and they said that's impossible it
00:21:40
defies the laws of physics she was convinced that they were wrong so in order to get them to come on board she
00:21:47
changed her pitch to them instead of saying I'm trying to build Wireless power can you make me this kind of
00:21:53
transducer she just said I'm trying to build a transducer can you make me this
00:21:58
part and she actually disguised her purpose because it was too radical for most people to understand and then a
00:22:03
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
00:22:09
her real Vision in that case inside a trojan horse right she's really trying
00:22:12
to build Wireless power but she has a bunch of people working on different pieces that ultimately will come
00:22:16
together for a different outcome than they intend and I think the more radical the more original your idea is the more
00:22:23
important it is to make sure that people aren't dissuaded by the end and instead
00:22:28
Focus them on perhaps a more moderate goal that they think is plausible uh does originality have um
00:22:37
roots in family uh does for example does birth order matter in originality it matters more than I expected going in
00:22:46
there's a huge debate about birth order and I would say the jury is still out
00:22:50
overall but there is compelling evidence that firstborns on average tend to be a
00:22:54
little bit smarter and a little bit more likely to achieve convention success in
00:22:59
fields like politics and science uh we have more elected officials who are firstborn for example uh we also have
00:23:06
more Nobel prize winning scientists however when it comes to originality completely changing the way that a field
00:23:12
operates or introducing a new technology there does appear to be a later born advantage and I think there are a couple
00:23:19
of reasons for that one is that laterborns are given more freedom so by the time you know you have three or four
00:23:27
older siblings you're allowed to do a lot of things that they weren't allowed
00:23:30
to do growing up and you get to take some risks the other thing that happens is some of the more conventional
00:23:35
achievement niches are filled so you know you may have an older sibling who's
00:23:40
the academic star and one who's an athlete and you need to find other ways to differentiate yourself and one of
00:23:45
those can be creativity uh I I was interested in tracking this as you know with comedians
00:23:52
uh so I took comedy Central's list of the hundred um greatest standup comics
00:23:55
of all time which had some great Originals people like Chris Rock George Carlin Jerry Seinfeld and I studied
00:24:02
their birth order and found that they were more than twice as likely to be born last in their families as first and
00:24:08
the odds of that happening by chancel at loone are two in a million so I think there there is perhaps an advantage for
00:24:15
laterborns in originality as a firstborn I was not excited by this research but the good news is that birth order
00:24:21
effects are not set in stone right so giving children the kinds of Freedom encouraging them to find unique niches
00:24:27
to express themselves I think can push all of us even us firstborns in a more original Direction so I I I I wonder if
00:24:34
you could talk about that in a little more detail how can parents uh nurture more originality uh among their children
00:24:42
well I think Role Models play an important part of this process so what a lot of children do is they become
00:24:49
unoriginal because they've only been exposed to models or standards who are very familiar and conventional right so
00:24:57
children grow up they see lots of Engineers doctors lawyers teachers and they say that's what I want to do too as
00:25:03
parents we can open up more original niches by exposing children to a much wider variety of occupations careers
00:25:10
ideas and some of the most original possibilities are not going to exist yet which is why when you listen to what
00:25:17
some of the great Originals in the technology World say they will frequently identify their inspiration in
00:25:23
science fiction uh books like Ender Game uh now we're probably going to see more
00:25:27
Harry Potter references is when we ask the next generation of entrepreneurs what inspired you but it's amazing how
00:25:33
many inventions come out of fictional stories and I think we could do a much better job making sure that children are
00:25:39
exposed to lots of ideas that don't exist yet so that when they see for example the next generation of somebody
00:25:45
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
00:25:51
create that you know when you consider families or even companies one of the big problem seems
00:25:59
to be group think how how does that come about and how can you prevent it a lot of people attribute group think to
00:26:07
cohesion they think that if we're too close if we trust each other too much M
00:26:11
if you and I like each other too much then we're not going to challenge each
00:26:14
other that turns out to be false um cohesive groups often make the best decisions and people frequently when
00:26:21
they trust each other are willing to challenge each other and say I know this person is not going to take this too
00:26:26
personally but if you're not careful cohesion can take you down a path toward group think when
00:26:33
people become more concerned about politics and about maintaining their relationships and reputations than about
00:26:39
speaking their minds and being honest so most leaders try to combat this by assigning Devil's Advocates right I know
00:26:47
that there's a majority preference in the room so I'm going to assign one
00:26:50
person to be the the opposite Devil's Advocates according to the research don't work very well most of the time
00:26:57
charlon neth Berkeley has been studying this for over four decades and what she shows is Devil's Advocates make two
00:27:03
mistakes one is they tend to give lip service to an idea but they don't really
00:27:06
believe in it so they don't sell it secondly when Devil's Advocates speak
00:27:11
people know they're just playing a role right I don't need to take you seriously
00:27:15
okay I pretended to advocate for this position and now we can go back to the majority preference instead of assigning
00:27:21
a devil's advocate I think what we all need to do is unearth a devil's advocate
00:27:25
genuine denters people who actually hold the minor opinion we need to find those
00:27:29
people we need to invite them into the conversation and give them a voice and what's so powerful about that is it
00:27:35
turns out minority opinions are useful even when they're wrong so let's say
00:27:39
we're going to hire one of four candidates and almost everybody in the room prefers candidate a and candidate B
00:27:47
is really the best one if someone comes in and advocates for candidate C we will
00:27:52
have a better shot at choosing ultimately the right candidate of B Because when Divergent information comes
00:27:58
to the table we're much more likely to reevaluate our assumptions consider new
00:28:01
criteria and make a better decision to to just uh conclude this fascinating conversation uh I wonder if
00:28:09
you could uh talk a little bit about how organizations can create a culture of nurturing
00:28:17
originality uh if you can offer some practical advice originality thrives as opposed to
00:28:26
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
00:28:33
okay for ideas to come up that don't go anywhere because if you squash all the
00:28:38
bad ideas you're going to miss out on some of your most original possibilities a second step that that
00:28:43
turns out to be really critical if you care about originality in your organization and especially if you want
00:28:48
it to be a core part of the culture is you have to think differently about hiring a lot of leaders hire on culture
00:28:54
fit they say look I want people who share our values who match the culture and that's actually a recipe for group
00:29:01
think you hire a bunch of people who look at problems in the same way who have the same opinions the same
00:29:06
principles Ideo the design firm has I think a compelling alternative to this they say look we're going to throw
00:29:12
cultural fit out the window instead we look for cultural contribution so when we hire we're not looking for people who
00:29:19
are going to replicate or clone the culture we're going to find people who enrich the culture and the test of that
00:29:25
is to figure out what's missing from your culture and then try to bring in people who can who can embody that and
00:29:31
then the I think the third thing to do if you want to build a culture of originality is you need to challenge the
00:29:36
status quo a lot you need to get people uh as Bob Sutton at Stanford would say feeling comfortable being
00:29:42
uncomfortable and one of my favorite ways of doing that is uh from Lisa bodell at Future think uh she actually
00:29:47
runs this kill the company exercise where she brings leaders together and has them spend maybe an hour or two
00:29:53
brainstorming ways to put their own company out of business now I've seen this done in um financial services and
00:29:59
pharmaceutical companies and I have never seen Executives so excited as when they finally get to to trash their own
00:30:05
employer but what's interesting about it is it shifts their mindset because they
00:30:10
start to think about instead of playing defense and protecting themselves against competitive threats they're on
00:30:15
offense and they get to try all these new possibilities and drill into them and then after that when they shift back
00:30:21
to thinking how do I defend against these threats they have much more creativity at their disposal so I think
00:30:26
that's a good example of of shaking things up a little bit Adam thanks so much for speaking with knowledge at
00:30:32
Warton today thank you [Music]