Opinion
Grant: The self-esteem movement has been disastrous for entrepreneurs
“I would also say that the self-esteem movement has been disastrous for entrepreneurs in the sense that Becoming a successful entrepreneur is not about thinking that you're special. It's about believing that, you know, somebody else could do this. Maybe I could…”
Insight
Grant: Pitching radical ideas requires starting with 'how', not 'why'
“But if you have a really original idea, that's terrible advice, because your why sounds insane to other people. And so if you're Meredith, or if you're Steve Jobs for that matter, sometimes the how is much more believable than the why.”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Hiring for cultural fit boosts IPO odds but slows post-IPO growth
“Founders who hire on cultural fit are less likely to see their startups fail, and they're more likely to make it to IPO. And then after IPO, their firms grow at a much slower rate than the ones that hire on skill or potential.”
Assertion Supported
Grant: 40 years of research shows assigned devil's advocates rarely work
“If you look at 40 years of research by Charlene Nemeth at Berkeley, she shows that devil's advocates rarely work.”
Assertion Contradicted
Grant: Playing Minesweeper before brainstorming boosted business plan creativity by 28%
“So one of G has experiments randomly assigned people to procrastinate before developing business plan ideas by playing minesweeper. And they were, after doing that, 28% more creative than people who jumped right into the task.”
Insight
Adam Grant: Deep domain expertise leads to cognitive entrenchment
“The longer you learn a particular domain of knowledge, and the more you internalize it, the easier it is to become entrenched, where you basically take for granted assumptions that need to get questioned.”
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Feb 2017
Grant: Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to perform or act
“On average, Nobel Prize winners are twice as likely to play a musical instrument. They're seven times as likely to paint and do other kinds of art. They're 12 times as likely to write creative fiction, poetry, and they're 22 times as likely to act, dance, or p…”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Empirical data shows zero correlation between talking ability and idea quality
“Susan Cain is fond of saying that there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas. And that's true empirically.”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Children's books with innovation themes predict patent rates decades later
“So if you look at the children's literature of a particular era, when that literature starts to include examples of people accomplishing things and succeeding in ways that are new and innovative, Patent rates actually spiked 20 to 40 years later.”
Opinion
Grant: J.K. Rowling is the most influential original thinker alive
“I really think Harry Potter is going to have this impact. I would probably put my money on JK Rowling as the most influential original alive because Harry Potter sold more books than any other series, except maybe the Bible.”
Insight
Grant: Growing companies should switch from hiring for cultural fit to cultural contribution
“At some point as your organization grows and you need to start questioning the very values that made you successful in the first place, you want to stop hiring on cultural fit and start hiring on cultural contribution.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Grant: Women face double standards when voicing workplace ideas
“When a woman and a man make the same point, the man gets a big pat on the back and people start to rally around him, and the woman is either not heard or punished for being too aggressive.”
Insight
Adam Grant: Earn status before attempting to exercise power
“One of the opportunities to overcome these biases is to make sure that you earn status before you exercise power.”
Insight
Grant: True Nonconformists Focus on Improving Things for Others
“When I think about nonconformists, I'm thinking about people who don't just reject the status quo for the sake of being different or for disagreeing, but actually care about making things better for other people.”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Call center workers using Chrome or Firefox stay 15% longer
“Basically what he found was Chrome and Firefox users were on average getting in call center jobs to customer satisfaction rates in 90 days that took Internet Explorer and Safari users a 120 days to reach. And the Chrome and Firefox users also stuck around 15% …”
Assertion Partly supported
Grant: Moderate procrastinators earn higher workplace creativity ratings than extreme procrastinators
“I had a PhD student, Jihei Shin, who studied this, and she found that there was a curvilinear relationship between how often you procrastinate and how creative your supervisors rate you in multiple organizations.”
Opinion
Grant: Opinions on Steve Jobs reveal commentators' biases, not Jobs
“I feel like Steve Jobs is a Rorschach test, where you put him out there, and then whatever response you hear is much more revealing of the person answering than it is of Steve Jobs.”
Assertion Supported
Adam Grant: Elon Musk pitched SpaceX recruits on orbit before Mars
“This is exactly what Elon Musk did with SpaceX. He didn't recruit his team by saying, let's go to Mars. He said, let's see if we can get a rocket into orbit, and then back.”
Insight
Adam Grant: Founders should recruit skeptical optimists over blind believers
“I think, though, that the people that I would want to hire, and that I think Elon wants to hire, are skeptical optimists.”
What-if
Grant: Galileo wouldn't have discovered lunar mountains without artistic training
“And in that case, if he had not been an artist, he never would have made that discovery.”
Insight
Adam Grant: Every positive trait or experience follows an inverted U-curve
“I wrote a paper about this a couple of years ago with Barry Schwartz, where we argued that everything in life is an inverted U and that, you know, if you take any strength or virtue or positive experience, you can find too much of a good thing where, you know,…”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Experts are believed more when they express uncertainty
“So Zach Termala at Stanford has these studies showing that experts are believed more when they express uncertainty.”
Assertion Supported
Grant: Highly creative architects were raised with freedom to define their own values
“One of the things that came out was that the parents of the creative architects tended to focus less on rules and more on values, but that they gave their children a lot of freedom to actually determine their own values.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grant: Reading Harry Potter reduces prejudice and stereotyping in children
“There's also academic research now showing that after kids read Harry Potter, they become less prejudiced. So they learn not to stereotype people in the way that wizards look down on muggles.”
