Aug 19, 2021 · 50m · how-i-built-this
Live From The HIBT Summit: Adam Grant
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In this live session from the How I Built This Summit, organizational psychologist Adam Grant joins host Guy Raz to explore how entrepreneurs and leaders can unlock innovation, overcome ego traps, and build agile organizations. Grant outlines actionable, research-backed frameworks for managing attention, testing hypotheses scientifically, normalizing failure, and fostering confident humility.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 33.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 3.9 Guest disagreement 1.9 Guy pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 20:38 Adam sharply rejects host premise on curiosity
When Guy asks whether choosing curiosity is possible, Adam abruptly shuts down the doubt with 'Of course it's a choice. What would make you think it's not?'
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 20:41 Guy pushes back on the ease of admitting errorGuy refuses to let Adam dismiss the psychological difficulty of being wrong, standing his ground with 'I don't think it's easy for everybody to find joy in being wrong.'
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 36:33 Adam dismantles group brainstorming orthodoxyAdam details 40 years of organizational psychology data proving group brainstorming produces fewer and worse ideas due to production blocking, ego threat, and the HIPPO effect.
Guy holds their own ▶ 44:18 Guy demonstrates deep literacy in innovation economicsGuy seamlessly builds on Adam's mention of Mariana Mazzucato, citing her work on how government funding enabled foundational technologies like the iPhone, prompting Adam's appreciative 'well done'.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shifting From Time Management to Attention Management | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy opens by contrasting Gary Vee's rigid time-auditing philosophy with Adam's reflective approach. Adam reframes the conversation around attention management rather than time efficiency, explaining his weekly planning habits. | |
| The Surprising Creative Benefits of Constructive Procrastination | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy references Adam's research on procrastination and ties it to his own habit of solving creative problems overnight. Adam clarifies the boundary between constructive incubation on hard problems and unproductive delay. | |
| Overcoming Roadblocks by Reframing Creative Blocks | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Guy contrasts Payal Kadakia's rapid iterative model with Perry Chen's multi-year development approach. Adam answers by citing an Italian randomized trial demonstrating that entrepreneurs trained to test hypotheses like scientists earned forty times more revenue. | |
| Escalation of Commitment and Building Challenge Networks | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Guy asks how founders distinguish heroic persistence from irrational stubbornness, citing Stonyfield Yogurt. Adam unpacks escalation of commitment and recommends cultivating challenge networks to counteract ego-driven blind spots. | |
| Finding Joy in Being Wrong and Cultivating Intellectual Humility | 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Adam recounts Danny Kahneman's joy at finding out he was wrong. When Guy asks if curiosity is a choice, Adam tersely pushes back that it obviously is, prompting Guy to defend the emotional difficulty of admitting error before Adam shares his childhood Mr. Facts story. | |
| Mid-Show Break and Summit Session Reintroduction | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following the mid-show break, Guy details Robert Reffkin's painful pivot at Compass that triggered employee departures. Adam explains how distinguishing fundamental principles from operational policies protects founders during course corrections. | |
| Normalizing Failure Rather Than Celebrating Silicon Valley Fetishization | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 | Guy brings up the tech ecosystem's obsession with failure as an on-ramp to success. Adam criticizes Silicon Valley's culture of celebrating failure and advocates normalizing it as an expected byproduct of ambition. | |
| Practical Self-Audits: Career, Creative, and Values Checkups | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks for actionable frameworks, prompting Adam to outline career, creative, and values checkups. Adam shares a personal anecdote about realizing learning was missing from his core values, inspiring him to start his podcast. | |
| Replacing Group Brainstorming With Individual Brainwriting | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Guy asks how remote work affects creative collaboration. Adam explains that four decades of research demonstrate group brainstorming is inferior to individual brainwriting due to production blocking, ego threat, and conformity. | |
| Institutionalizing Innovation Through Problem Boxes and Tournaments | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks how large organizations institutionalize creativity rather than relying on accidental innovation. Adam provides concrete mechanisms including Warby Parker's problem boxes and Dow Chemical's structured innovation tournaments. | |
| Government Investment as the Catalyst for Unprofitable Innovation | 7 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Guy asks how society can incentivize unprofitable innovation, pointing to government backing for mRNA vaccines. When Adam cites Mariana Mazzucato's research, Guy immediately elaborates on Mazzucato's findings regarding public funding behind major private-sector breakthroughs. | |
| Cultivating Confident Humility and Vulnerable Leadership | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Guy asks about confident humility and whether shortcuts exist. Adam explains that building character requires deliberate effort and shares experimental data showing leaders who publicly voice their weaknesses generate higher psychological safety. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Grant: Attention management drives productivity better than time management
“So I think that what I've tried to shift to is From time management to attention management. To say that the one thing I can really control is what I focus on. And I like to start every week with the people and projects that matter to me. And that way, when I'…”
Grant: Society does not need another leadership or self-esteem book
“We just don't need another leadership book. I, I'm pretty convinced. I don't think we need another self-help book either on self-esteem for that matter, right?”
Adam Grant: Reoccurring organic ideas signal concepts worth developing
“Every once in a while, what I notice is I've had the same idea three or four times, and I didn't even remember it. And when I got excited about the same idea in, you know, different points in my life it signals to me that there's something interesting and wort…”
Grant: Delaying difficult tasks fosters incubation and enhances creative insight
“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…”
Grant: Founders trained to think scientifically generated 40x more revenue
“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…”
Grant: Sunk-cost traps stem from ego rather than economics
“We think it's about some costs, but the most powerful drivers are not economic. They're emotional. It's ego and image. I don't want to look like a bad decision maker. I don't want to see a bad decision maker in the mirror.”
Grant: BlackBerry made only one product when valued over $70B
“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.”
Grant: Founders move to being right faster by quickly admitting error
“I think one of the most basic truths of entrepreneurship, which is overlooked by almost every founder I've ever worked with or advised, is that the faster you are to recognize when you're wrong, the faster you can move toward being right.”
Grant: I send self-deprecating emails whenever I am proven wrong
“And ever since then I have tried to do something whenever I find out that I might have been wrong. I write an email to someone, I just did this the day before yesterday and it says the subject line is, you were right, I was wrong, and then I go on to quote Hap…”
Grant: Framing policies as testable hypotheses prevents mutiny during business pivots
“That's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis. It might be true. It might be false. Let's go and test it. And if it turns out that I'm wrong, I would love your feedback on other ways that we can value agents in a way that the industry just hasn't before. Before. And …”
Grant: Celebrating failure is one of Silicon Valley's worst exports
“I think one of the worst exports of Silicon Valley to the rest of the world is the idea that we should celebrate failure.”
Grant: I declined an opportunity to invest in Warby Parker
“I was definitely not ready to party when, you know, Warby Parker went from an idea that I had declined to invest in to a unicorn.”
Adam Grant: Schedule career checkups biannually to avoid analysis paralysis
“Schedule a career checkup put it in your calendar. Don't do it every day because then you're going to be stuck in analysis paralysis and you will never engage in that job. ... But if you do it twice a year, it's a great moment to pause and reflect and ask, Hav…”
Adam Grant: Organizations should cap core values at three to five
“The data would say we should have three to five core values. If you have more than that, then people can't remember them and they don't agree on, you know, what each one means and what the hierarchy of them is.”
Grant: Ctrip study showed working from home boosted productivity by 13.5%
“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.”
Grant: Independent idea generation produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming
“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.”
Grant: Dow Chemical saved $110M annually from 575 tournament ideas
“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.”
Grant: Corporate innovation tournaments require strict parameters and timelines
“Crowdsourcing needs structure. In a well-designed innovation tournament, my colleagues Christian Tervish and Carl Ulrich have studied this. You need a focus call, right? You want to hear the save energy, reduce waste. The 200 grand is the cap. And then people …”
Grant: Federal funding is the most underappreciated driver of innovation
“Federal government investment innovation, in innovation is probably the single most underestimated and underappreciated driver of creativity and of entrepreneurship.”
Grant: VCs ignore critical innovation to focus on easy 10x returns
“The problem with venture capitalists is they tend to invest in the ideas that are easy to 10 X or more. And we often have to look to the government to invest in ideas like a COVID vaccine, right? That are probably not going to be as profitable.”
Grant: Managers sharing critical feedback out loud increases team psychological safety
“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…”