The Ledger, every show

“And the better you are at individual sales, the worse you tend to be as a manager. Your teams actually achieve poorer performance.”

“We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you had let them come up with ideas independently, you get more ideas and also better ideas on average.”

“We found that when we went and encouraged managers to go and ask for feedback, it didn't have a lasting effect on psychological safety.”

“When we randomly assign managers to kind of criticize themselves as opposed to asking for criticism, just inviting them to do that once increased psychological safety in their teams for at least a year.”

“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.”

“If you look at 40 years of research by Charlene Nemeth at Berkeley, she shows that devil's advocates rarely work.”

“If you look at the entrepreneurship realm, for example, or companies launching new products on average the sort of the settlers as opposed to the pioneers, the second and third movers are about seven times less likely to fail than the first movers.”

“In this research that Jihei Shin and I did, we found consistently that if you were putting off a task because it was hard and you hadn't figured it out yet, that that opened up opportunities to incubate. You were more likely to access remote knowledge. You wer…”

“Over the next year, on average, the entrepreneurs who had been trained to think like scientists, randomly assigned, brought in more than 40 times the revenue of the control group. That is a staggering effect. And the major mechanism behind it is they were more…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers and even medical professionals the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They made up a disproportionate numbe…”

“We know, for example, that if you look at the meta-analyses that Podzikoff and colleagues have published, that the amount of time you spend helping others is as critical to your job performance as how well you do your actual tasks. They carry about equal weigh…”

“What first got me thinking differently about character was this incredible study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, where they show that you can predict your income in your twenties by just looking at how many years of experience your kindergarten teacher had.”

“There's a growing body of evidence showing that if you want specific, useful tips, you should ask for advice rather than feedback.”

“One of the most robust findings in psychology over the past three decades is that belonging to a unique group actually serves a terror management function. That it helps you avoid threats to your own mortality or at least it makes you worry less about what mig…”

“And one of the things we've studied is we've asked leaders and managers to actually share their own performance reviews with their teams, or to talk about some of the critical feedback they've received in the past, and how they're working to grow in those area…”

“We know that it's better to go up to three or four empirically. In too many cases also it's each interviewer's job to make an overall assessment of the candidate, which makes it too easy to decide you like someone, and then confirmation bias and desirability b…”

“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% …”

“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.”

“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.”

“So Zach Termala at Stanford has these studies showing that experts are believed more when they express uncertainty.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And you know, there is a piece of the story that's explained by ability, but even after controlling for cognitive ability tests for various kinds of skill metrics the, you know, sort of the polarization of giver performance held up and it turned out to be much…”

“Jennifer Ocker has some data suggesting that, you know, sort of day to day takers experience more pleasure than givers do because they get to make like every choice is exactly what they want.”

“So we know, for example, there's some neat research by Rapp and colleagues, which basically shows that if you spend a lot of time helping other people if you have poor time management skills, that's really bad for your performance or your productivity. But if …”

“If you look at highly creative high schoolers, for example, On average they had about half a rule in their household, whereas they're sort of, I don't know how that works, but averages are misleading in many ways. Not just this one. There you go. but you know…”

“In the data you know, parents say that, The concern for others is their most important value, but kids think that achievement is their most important value.”

“It is insane to me that when they were valued at over seventy billion dollars, they still only made one product. They just had a bunch of variations on the Blackberry, which is a great way to, you know, to persist into obsolescence.”

“Nick Bloom at Ctrip in China showing that when you're randomly assigned to work from home, you're about 13 and a half percent more productive and half as likely to quit.”

“Well, Dow ends up investing over a decade in 575 ideas. On average, they save the company a hundred ten million US dollars a year.”

“And the experts they spent far more time planning for and then talking about common ground was the first takeaway.”

“Then a second difference that, that jumped out pretty clearly is the experts asked a lot more questions than the average negotiators. And they weren't leading questions. They were questions motivated by genuine curiosity.”

“If you asked Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to name their favorite childhood books, they both picked Lord of the Rings. Jeff Bezos and Sheryl Sandberg both said A Wrinkle in Time.”

“I found that over half of people identify this as their primary interaction style at work where they say, look, I don't want to be too selfish. I don't want to be too generous.”

“And one of the first criteria is, are you the first author in a patent that's worth at least a hundred million US dollars?... So we're gonna say there are other criteria too, which include, are you a supporting author on other people's patents?”