Book Summary: Originals by Adam Grant

Chapter 1: Creative Destruction – The Risky Business of Going Against the Grain

• People who step outside of the defaults show more originality and initiative. Example used of customer service agents whose default browser was Chrome or Firefox were more likely to stay in their jobs than those who used Internet Explorer; hypothesis is that if you don’t use the default, you demonstrate some resourcefulness and are willing to step “outside the box” and modify the requirements of the job to suit you.
• The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.
• Creative students tend to be non-conformists who make up their own rules. Teachers tend to discriminate against highly creative students, labeling them as troublemakers (which causes many of those kids to suppress their creativity and get in line). High achievement motivation can also crowd out creativity – you look for activities with high probability of success instead of creative pursuits that have more varied results.
• Many original thinkers are hesitant to take the spotlight, often because the spotlight is risky (a revolutionary new idea, diverting your time and energy from something more prosaic like a stable job, etc.).
• To be an original, you need to take radical risks. However, is OK to be measured in how you assume risks. For entrepreneurs who start a new business, those who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely your business will be built to last.
• Risks are like stock portfolios – you have a diversified pool of risks so that one risky venture won’t sink you. Entrepreneurs tend to be significantly more risk averse than the general population.
• Having control in our jobs is a predictor of happiness in those jobs. If you see your job as flexible and tailorable to your own unique interests, skills, and values, there will tend to be an increase in happiness and performance.

Chapter 2: Blind Inventors and One-Eyed Investors – The Art and Science of Recognizing Original Ideas

• Why did so many prominent people (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, John Doerr) incorrectly predict Dean Kamen’s Segway would be a massive hit? Why was the hit show Seinfeld rejected by nearly everyone at the networks, who failed to see its success? 
• The biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation – it’s idea selection. Most people can dream up unique ideas, but selecting the right ideas tends to be the obstacle. Segway was a false positive (forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss), while Seinfeld was a false negative (expected to fail but ultimately flourished).
• Creators don’t tend to have good insight into which of their own works will be hits. People tend to overestimate and be overconfident in their own abilities. If people can’t judge the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Creative geniuses aren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers, but they produce a greater volume of work, which gives them more variation and a higher chance of originality. The most prolific people not only have the highest originality, they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume. Quantity is also the most predictable path to quality – rather than degrading quality, quantity generates a larger pool of ideas, especially novel ideas.
• The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience. Dean Kamen didn’t do this when inventing the Segway; he kept many of its details secret, even from his own development team. He lacked enough critical input from customers.
• In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past. The more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. Test audiences and focus groups often fall prey to the same biases – they evaluate against existing standards. However, fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas tend to do best at predicting hits (about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences). Colleagues lack the risk-aversion of managers and test audiences, and are open to seeing the potential in unusual possibilities, which guards against false negatives, but have no investment in our ideas, giving them enough distance to offer an honest appraisal.
• To boost chances that people would correctly rank a novel, useful idea first, as opposed to favoring conventional ideas, helps to have people go into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves first – just six minutes was enough to improve ability to see the potential in something unusual. 
• Seinfeld made it to production because it was adopted by someone who wasn’t involved specifically in producing sitcoms. However, he did have some experience in creating and writing comedy, and so he knew enough to recognize the potential of the idea. It is when people have moderate expertise in a particular domain that they’re the most open to radically creative ideas. This unique combination of broad and deep experience is critical for creativity. Nobel prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists:

Artistic Hobby	Odds for Nobel Prize winners relative to typical scientists
Music: playing an instrument, composing, conducting	2x greater
Arts: drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpting	7x greater
Crafts: woodworking, mechanics, electronics, glassblowing	7.5x greater
Writing: poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books	12x greater
Performing: amateur actor, dancer, magician	22x greater

• Hazards of intuition: domain inexperience, hubris, and enthusiasm can lead to overconfidence in new ideas and lead to false positives. Our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience. Some people weren’t convinced Segway would be a huge success, because they dug deeper and concluded that it was a product that would change behavior at a very high expense with limited value.
• Dean Kamen was also very passionate about the Segway, which helped convince many followers. But on closer scrutiny, if you look at Kamen’s successes, for many of them he didn’t come up with the original idea, he only invented the product to solve a problem that others had already identified to him. For the Segway, he started with a solution and then went hunting for a problem; instead of responding to market pull, he initiated a technology push. He wasn’t prepared to execute it successfully (in Segway’s case, making it cost-effective was important). The passion you should be looking for is passion on execution to refine ideas, not passion about the ideas themselves.
• How to avoid pitfalls? Generate lots of ideas and systematically test them. Have peers evaluate ideas. Don’t limit access to ideas – make them transparent to everyone (including fellow creators, who tend to be more open to radically novel ideas).

Chapter 3: Out on a Limb – Speaking Truth to Power

• To speak out and advocate for an idea effectively, you first need to have power and/or status. Power involves exercising control or authority over others; status is being respected and admired. People get punished for trying to exercise power without status. When people seek to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceive them as difficult, coercive, and self-serving. We feel they haven’t earned our admiration and don’t have the right to tell us what to do, and we push back.
• As you gain respect for your efforts, you gain idiosyncrasy credits – the latitude to deviate from the group’s expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank; they’re based on contributions.
• When presenting ideas to people who have more power than you:
  • If trying to convince them to commit resources, it makes sense to emphasize strengths and minimize weaknesses if the audience is supportive.
  • But if you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change or presenting to investors, your audience is likely to be skeptical. Under those circumstances, it’s more effective to adopt a form of powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea. This has four advantages:
    1. Leading with weakness disarms the audience. People naturally raise their mental shields when they are aware they are trying to be persuaded. Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship. Leading with weakness shifts attention away from self-defense towards problem solving. 
    2. Being forthright about faults and leading with the limitations of an idea makes you look smart (as long as the idea is sound).  In an example, people judged the author of a negative book review to be more intelligent than the author of an otherwise identical positive book review. People think an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professional to critique it. 
    3. Being up front about the downsides of your idea makes you more trustworthy.
    4. It leaves audiences with a more favorable assessment of the idea itself, due to a bias in how we process information. By acknowledging the most serious problems, it makes it harder for investors to generate their own ideas about what’s wrong. It’s easy to think of three things that are good or bad; it’s much harder to think of a list of 12.
• Unfamiliarity breeds contempt. When we pitch our ideas, you know the entire idea and will tend to undercommunicate it to others by a factor of 10; the audience doesn’t have as much exposure to the idea as you do. The more exposure you give an idea, the more familiar people get with it and the more they like it. Evidence suggests that liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between 10 and 20 times, with additional exposure still useful for more complex ideas. Exposures are more effective when they’re short and mixed in with other ideas.
• Four options for handling a dissatisfying situation:

Choices are based on feelings of control and commitment. Do you feel you can effect change, and do you care enough to try? If you believe you’re stuck with the status quo, you’ll choose neglect when you’re not committed, and persistence when you are. If you feel you can make a difference, but aren’t committed, you’ll leave (perhaps to find another place where you can speak up). Only when you believe your actions matter and care deeply will you consider speaking up.

• At work, our sense of commitment and control depends more on our direct boss than on anyone else. Disagreeable managers are better than agreeable managers, because agreeable managers want to please and hate conflict even more. Disagreeable people will criticize, confront, or challenge others. We are better off targeting suggestions to people with a history of originality.
• Middle-class conformity effect: If you’re at the top, you’re expected to be different and therefore have the license to deviate. If you’re still at the bottom of a status hierarchy, you have little to lose and everything to gain by being original. But the middle segment, where the majority of people are found,  is dominated by insecurity since you don’t want to jeopardize your standing in the group and go back down. Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original. If you are in the middle and want to voice an original idea, it makes more sense to voice ideas upward and downward, and spend less time appealing to the middle.

Chapter 4: Fools Rush In – Timing, Strategic Procrastination, and the First-Mover Disadvantage

• Procrastination can be conducive to originality. By intentionally delaying the work that needs to be done, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea.
• Procrastination is a common habit of creative thinkers and great problem solvers.
• Those with the most and least at stake were the most likely to procrastinate in the creative domain.
• Zeigarnik Effect – people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks.
• Procrastination also keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of vision.
• Procrastinators don’t skip planning altogether – they procrastinate strategically, making gradual progress by testing and refining different possibilities. This also allows them to build up a number of possible alternatives they can draw from to bring their ideas to fruition (as in developing different themes for a speech or a piece of music).
• Evidence doesn’t much support the first-mover advantage. 47% of pioneers fail compared with just 8% of settlers. Pioneers are about 6 times more likely to fail than settlers, and when they do survive, pioneers only capture an average of 10% of the market, compared with 28% for settlers. However, people still have a propensity to believe an act as if being a first-mover confers advantage despite evidence to the contrary – the best way to address this is to ask yourself what are the four biggest drawbacks of being a pioneer.
  1. Pioneers are prone to overstep.
  2. The kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Impulsive risk seekers are drawn to being first, while more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering.
  3. Settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better.
  4. Pioneers can get stuck in their early offerings, while settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly.
• Sometimes ideas fail because they are ahead of their time. You need to wait for the market and consumers to develop to a point where a practice or behavior becomes acceptable.
• First-mover advantages DO tend to prevail when patented technology is involved, or when there are strong network effects. 
• Young geniuses and old masters – Two different styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental.
  • Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along, without a specific solution in mind at the outset. Conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners. Conceptual innovators tend to be young because conceptual innovation can be done quickly because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation.  Conceptual breakthroughs also tend to occur early because it is easiest to come up with a strikingly original insight when we approach a problem with a fresh perspective. But conceptual innovators become less original once they become entrenched in conventional ways of approaching problems.
  • Experimental innovation can require years or decades to accumulate the requisite knowledge or skill, but it becomes a more sustainable source of originality. Instead of making plans in advance for what you want to create, you can test out different kinds of tentative ideas and solutions. If you’re patient enough, you may stumble onto something that’s novel and useful.

Chapter 5: Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse – Creating and Maintaining Coalitions

• The originals who start a movement will often be its most radical members, whose ideas and ideals will prove too hot for those who follow their lead. To form alliances with opposing groups, it’s best to temper the cause, cooling it as much as possible. Yet to draw allies into joining the cause itself, what’s needed is a moderately tempered message that is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.
• The more strongly you identify with an extreme group, the harder you seek to differentiate yourself from more moderate groups that threaten your values. You will tend to judge your opponents more favorably than those that are similar, but more moderate, than you.
• People who do the same thing together share significantly more with each other and feel more similar to each other and more like a team than participants in other conditions.
• In seeking alliances with groups that share our values, we overlook the importance of sharing our strategic tactics. Shared tactics are an important predictor of alliances. Even if they care about different causes, groups find affinity when they use the same methods of engagement. However, when the overlap in tactics is too large, coalitions become less likely because groups have less to learn and gain from one another. Movements are also more likely to align when one has moderately higher status than the other, as opposed to when there was no status difference or an extreme status difference.
• Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the purpose and vision behind our ideas, people will follow us. This works – unless you are doing something that challenges the status quo. When people championing change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions and violate common notions of what’s possible. Therefore, to succeed, originals must become tempered radicals and tone down their radicalism by presenting their beliefs and ideas in ways that are less shocking and more appealing to mainstream audiences. One way to do this is by obscuring the most extreme feature inside a Trojan horse and using small wins and agreements to build to larger outcomes (Cialdini’s foot-in-the-door technique).
• For insiders, the key representative is the person who is most central and connected in the group. But for outsiders, the person who represents the group is the one with the most extreme views.
• Enemies make better allies than frenemies.

Dealing with ambivalent people is more stressful than dealing with people who are consistently undermining, because at least the latter are predictable, but it takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent (higher rates of stress, depression, and dissatisfaction with life). Our instincts are normally to sever the bad relationships and salvage the ambivalent ones, but the evidence suggests we ought to do the opposite: cut our frenemies and attempt to convert our enemies. You will view people who converted to your point of view in higher regard, and they will also feel the same for you. Both parties had to work hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, and will be motivated to maintain a positive relationship to avoid cognitive dissonance from changing their minds again. Former adversaries are also the most effective at persuading others to join our movements because they understand the doubts and misgivings that others have and have more credibility.

Chapter 6: Rebel with a Cause – How Siblings, Parents, and Mentors Nurture Originality

• Laterborns tend to take more risks. In baseball, younger siblings tend to steal more bases. Younger siblings are also more likely to participate in sports with higher injury rates. The difference even shows up in politics and science. Laterborns are twice as likely as firstborns to champion major scientific upheavals and political revolutions. However, parenting practices can nurture first-born children who are more original.
• Laterborns don’t have inferior abilities, but they redirect their focus to other areas. They may perceive first-born preoccupations with academic and economic success as distasteful quests for authority and conformity. As a result, laterborns are more prone to rebellion (e.g., manifesting in ways ranging form bad drinking and smoking habits to lower likelihood of buying retirement accounts and life insurance packages). 
• One theory for laterborn behavior is niche picking: competing by not competing. Alfred Adler argued that firstborn children start as only children and initially identify with their parents. When a younger sibling arrives, firstborns risk being “dethroned” and assert their authority over the younger sibling, setting the stage for rebellion. Faced with the intellectual and physical challenges of competing directly with an older sibling, the younger chooses a different way to stand out.
• Kids with many siblings tend to be looked after more by their siblings. Older siblings serve as surrogate parents and role models, and younger siblings don’t face as many rules or punishments and enjoy the security of older siblings’ protection. Younger siblings also end of taking risks earlier: instead of emulating more risk-averse adults, they follow the lead of other children. Parents also tend to become more relaxed in their parenting habits towards laterborns.
• Regardless of birth order, how parents discipline bad behavior and praise good behavior has a huge impact on how their children respond to events later in life. Parents who explain have a profound impact on how their children think.
  • “It is in their reliance on reasoning, explanations, suggestions of ways to remedy the harm done, persuasion, and advice that the parents of rescuers [of Jews during the Holocaust] differed most… Reasoning communicates a message of respect… It implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way. It is a mark of esteem for the listener; an indication of faith in his or her ability to comprehend, develop, and improve.”
  • Reasoning accounted for only 6% of the disciplinary techniques that bystanders’ parents used, but accounted for 21% of how rescuers’ parents disciplined their children.
  • This approach also characterizes the parents of teenagers who don’t engage in criminal deviance and originals who challenge the orthodoxies of their professions. In one study, parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of less than one rule and tended to place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules.
  • If parents do believe in enforcing a lot of regulations, they way they explain them matters a great deal. Teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner, by yelling or threatening punishment. When many rules are enforced but with a clear rationale for why they’re important, teenagers are substantially less likely to break them, because they internalize them. These parents outline their standards of conduct and explain their grounding in a set of principles about right and wrong, referencing values like morality, integrity, respect, curiosity, and perseverance. Emphasis is placed upon the development of one’s ethical code and granting children the autonomy to chose their own values.
  • Another important aspect of disciplining children is to encourage children to consider the impact of their actions on others. Highlighting consequences for others directs attention to the distress of the person who may be harmed by an individual’s behavior, fueling empathy for her. It also helps children understand the role that their own actions played in causing the harm, resulting in guilt. The dual moral emotions of empathy and guilt activate the desire to right wrongs of the past and behave better in the future.
• Thinking about oneself invokes the logic of consequence for oneself. But thinking about others prompts a logic of appropriateness: What should a person like me do in a situation like this? It changes the calculation from a cost-benefit equation to a contemplation of values, of right and wrong. (Example of a sign that says “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases” vs “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases”.)
• Praising behavior vs praising character: children who received character praise internalize it as part of their identities. Instead of seeing themselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, they start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person. Ideal time for this type of praise is sometime between 5 and 10 years old.
  • Use nouns instead of verbs. Instead of asking children to help, ask them to be helpers. Don’t ask people not to cheat, ask them not to be cheaters.
• If we want to encourage our children’s originality, the best step we can take is to raise our children’s aspirations by introducing them to different kinds of role models. Even fictional characters can be role models: there are stories that show that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more. Compelling role models for originality also expand our awareness of niches that we had never considered.

Chapter 7: Rethinking Groupthink – The Myths of Strong Cultures, Cults, and Devil’s Advocates

• Groupthink is the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent. Groupthink is the enemy of originality; people feel pressured to conform to the dominant, default views instead of championing diversity of thought.
• Cohesion theory says that groups that become too cohesive develop a strong culture, and people share the same values and norms and believe in them intensely (verging on operating like a cult). To solve problems and make wise decisions, groups need original ideas and dissenting views, so we need to make sure members don’t get too chummy. But it isn’t true.
  • Cohesive groups actually tend to make better business decisions. Benefits of cohesive groups include enhanced communication and members are likely to be secure enough in their roles to challenge one another. 
• Three dominant templates for organizational models: (1) professional – emphasize hiring candidates with specific skills; (2) star – focus on future potential and raw brainpower to acquire future skills; (3) commitment – cultural fit is the priority, match company’s values and norms (autocracy and bureaucracy are the two others). The commitment model outperforms the others – not a single Silicon Valley startup from the 1990s through early 2000s failed (vs substantial failure rates for star blueprint, and even three times worse for the professional blueprint). Skills and stars are fleeting, but commitment lasts.
• Commitment cultures work well in the early stages of an organization’s life, but they tend to falter over time. They help organizations survive and go public, but after that they grow slower in stock-market value than even bureaucratic blueprints. Commitment firms have greater difficulty attracting, retaining, or integrating a diverse workforce, and in a volatile industry such a strong culture has a harder time recognizing the need for change and are more likely to resist the insights of those who think differently, meaning they don’t learn and adapt as well.
  • Starting with a commitment culture and then switching to another blueprint is also not effective, as it creates turnover and increases the odds of failure and/or growing more slowly. The key is to create the right commitment culture from the very beginning.
• A tenet of brainstorming is “don’t criticize,” but research indicates that groups that debate and criticize aren’t afraid to share ideas and generate 16% more ideas than those that don’t, and that dissent helps lead groups to the best decisions as long as members feel that everyone is looking out for one another’s best interests.
• Minority and dissenting viewpoints are important because they stimulate divergent attention and thought, even when they’re wrong.
• The evidence suggests that social bonds don’t drive groupthink; the culprits are overconfidence from leaders and reputational concerns about voicing dissenting opinions, when those concerns are marginalized. 
• Bridgewater Associates has one of the strongest organizational cultures, based on principles that promote the expression of original ideas, inviting dissenting opinions from all employees (even to higher ups), expecting employees to voice concerns and critiques directly to each other, and not withholding critical opinions without speaking up about them. Employees are expected to challenge the principles and surface the highest quality ideas, which requires radical transparency.
• Using a devil’s advocate to argue for another viewpoint is only moderately effective. It is seldom sufficient to change someone’s mind. Because of confirmation bias, people are persuaded by the arguments that affirm their preference, and they discount those that don’t. More effective is to find someone who authentically and sincerely disagrees with your position, which helps stimulates thought. Groups with authentic dissenters generated 48% more solutions to problems than those with a devil’s advocate, and their solutions also tended to be higher in quality.
• At Bridgewater, employees are expected to bring problems, not solutions. It is unlikely that anyone would have a full and complete understanding of the problem, so you identify the problem first, then work through inquiry to make sure you fully understand it before you move on working on a solution and advocacy. If you cannot identify the problems, you can’t make progress on them. 
• At Bridgewater people have a believability score so you can assess how strongly you can rely on their opinion based on their judgment, reasoning, and behavior in the past. 
• If a company has several principles, they should be rank ordered in a hierarchy, from most to least important. The relative importance of multiple values guides action. When organizations fail to prioritize principles, performance suffers. 

Chapter 8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping It Steady – Managing Anxiety, Apathy, Ambivalence, and Anger

• Originals can still harbor ambivalence, self-doubt, and uncertainty about whether they can handle difficult decisions, choices that require courage, and ability to succeed in their mission. There are two strategies for handling these challenges: strategic optimism and defensive pessimism. Strategic optimists anticipate the best, staying calm and setting high expectations. Defensive pessimists expect the worst, feeling anxious and imagining all the things that can go wrong. Research shows that although defensive pessimists are more anxious and less confident in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks, they perform just as well as strategic optimists.
• Defensive pessimists do better after thinking about negative outcomes. They don’t allow themselves to be crippled by fear; they deliberately imagine a disaster scenario to intensify their anxiety and convert it into motivation. Once they’ve considered the worst, they’re driven to avoid it, considering every relevant detail to exert a sense of control and plan for success. Their confidence comes from a realistic appraisal and an exhaustive plan. Fear forces you to prepare more rigorously and see potential problems more quickly. 
• Reframing fear as excitement can improve performance and motivation (tested with public speaking – say “I am excited” before you go up to speak). Fear is a response to a future event and so is difficult to turn off; since you can’t stop or turn off the future event, fear is counterproductive compared to converting it into excitement and enthusiasm.
• Once settled on a course of action, when anxieties creep in, it is better to think like a defensive pessimist and confront them directly and harness anxiety as a source of motivation to prepare and succeed. The unknown is more terrifying than the negative, so by imagining the worst and knowing the limit of the bad outcomes helps you regain control and start planning how to deal with the negative aspects. 
• To inspire others, it is more effective to have a beneficiary of the program or project communicate the benefits they obtained to those charged with making the action happen. (e.g. people calling to raise money for a charity do better when they are exposed to a story about someone who personally benefited from that charity as opposed to a message from the leader of the charity.)
• Humor can be an effective motivator in an otherwise somber or dour (especially political) environment. Humor can be used to unify the oppressed; it is much easier for people to start speaking up or acting out when they see someone else doing it, and is easier to participate when the activities are humorous and non-threatening, but directed against the “regime.” This is a way to rev up the go system instead of trying to decelerate the stop system.
• The biggest error companies make when trying to institute major changes is in failing to establish a sense of urgency. Framing options as loss avoidance rather than preserving guaranteed gains tends to motivate people to make the choice that avoid the guaranteed loss, even if it means taking a gamble and risking an even bigger one. (If you’re going to lose something anyway, you might as well throw caution to the wind and make the big gamble, hoping you’ll lose nothing.)
  • If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing? It depends on whether they perceive the new behavior as safe or risky. It they think the behavior is safe, you should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it – they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But if people believe a behavior is risky, they’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, you need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when you are faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t.
  • If you want people to take risks, you first need to show what’s wrong with the present and cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. Then, compare that to what could be, making the gap as big as possible. “Instead of courage, foster a level of fury with the status quo such that one cannot not act. [Tom Peters]”
• Venting doesn’t help relieve anger, it reinforces it and acts like a lead foot on the gas pedal of the go system. Venting focuses attention on the perpetrator of the injustice, and the more you think about it, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation. To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it; focusing on the victims of injustice spurs us to speak truth to power. Focusing on the victim activates empathetic anger – the desire to right the wrongs done unto another. When we’re angry forothers, we seek out justice and a better system – we want to help, not to punish.

ACTIONS FOR IMPACT

Individual Actions:

1. Generating and Recognizing Original Ideas
   1. Question the default.
   2. Triple the number of ideas you generate.
   3. Immerse yourself in a new domain.
   4. Procrastinate strategically.
   5. Seek more feedback from peers.
2. Voicing and Championing Original Ideas
   1. Balance your risk portfolio.
   2. Highlight the reasons not to support your idea.
   3. Make your ideas more familiar.
   4. Speak to a different audience.
   5. Be a tempered radical.
3. Managing Emotions
   1. Motivate yourself differently when you’re committed vs uncertain.
   2. Don’t try to calm down.
   3. Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator.
   4. Realize you’re not alone.
   5. Remember that if you don’t take initiative, the status quo will persist.

Leader Actions:

1. Sparking Original Ideas
   1. Run an innovation tournament.
   2. Picture yourself as the enemy.
   3. Invite employees from different functions and levels to pitch ideas.
   4. Hold an opposite day.
   5. Ban the words like, love, and hate.
2. Building Cultures of Originality
   1. Hire not on cultural fit, but on cultural contribution.
   2. Shift from exit interviews to entry interviews.
   3. Ask for problems, not solutions.
   4. Stop assigning devil’s advocates and start unearthing them.
   5. Welcome criticism.

Parent and Teacher Actions:

1. Ask children what their role models would do.
2. Link good behaviors to moral behavior.
3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others.
4. Emphasize values over rules.
5. Create novel niches for children to pursue.