How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live From The HIBT Summit: Adam Grant

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

We have another episode from the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit, and it's Guy's interview with organizational psychology professor and author Adam Grant. He's known for his books Think Again, Give and Take and Originals. Adam is also the host of the podcast WorkLife. In this live conversation, Adam explains why entrepreneurs should take a scientific approach to decision-making and why admitting you're wrong goes a long way to learning what's right. We'll be releasing more episodes from the Summit throughout the month of August, so keep checking your podcast feed.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello everyone and welcome to another special edition of How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. At our virtual How I Built This Summit this year, we spoke to all kinds of amazing founders, creators, and authors. like Adam Grant. Adam's a professor at the Wharton School and an organizational psychologist.

You might have read some of his books like originals and give and take or his brand new one, Think Again. Adam's also the host of the podcast Work Life. He's spent years studying how to think differently and creatively and how to question our own assumptions without getting paralyzed by our doubts and fears. So here's my conversation with Adam Grant from the 2021 virtual how I built this summit. I want to start by asking me, so on Monday night we had Gary V on, on Gary Vaynerchuk, and actually was so, it was terrific, but he said something and I really really wanted to get your take on it.

You know, he said, look, a lot of us waste too much time, that if we actually didn't audit of how we spend our time every waking moment, we would save several hours a day. And we could actually fill that time. He was talking about marketing. we could fill that time with making content, with marketing our products or services or ourselves. He produces 100 pieces of content a day. But I think that you might want us to spend time that time differently. Maybe just thinking?

Maybe. I don't know. I've had a love-hate relationship with time management. On the one hand, I want to use my time as efficiently and productively as possible. on the other hand, all the time I've spent trying to optimize my schedule just makes me more aware of how much time I waste. And at the end of the day, I do not know how to get more hours in the day. I've tried to sacrifice sleep, doesn't work, I can't function. So I think that what I've tried to shift to you 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'm focused on meaningful relationships and trying to accomplish something worthwhile, it doesn't really matter how long it takes. And I've found that that's much better for my productivity than setting a goal of using my time more efficiently because efficiency serves no one. What I'm ultimately after is doing work that's interesting and important. And that means it's got to be intrinsically motivating to me. It has to be beneficial to others. And if I can concentrate on that, it doesn't really, matter whether it takes two hours or six. You know, you are, as everyone knows who's watching, you're a scholar, you're a researcher,

you're a tenured professor, but you are also an entrepreneur. You have to come up with ideas that are interesting, that are innovative. I mean, your books give and take and originals, I mean, they are so innovative and so interesting, and that requires a lot of thinking. I mean, you have to come up with those ideas. How do you begin to do that? I imagine it's not just about time management. Sometimes it's about just thinking, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. One of the things I've tried to do is reverse engineer some of the projects that I'm relatively proud of and some of the ones that I regret. And one thing I've noticed is obviously a project has to start with, you know, with passion or curiosity. I have to care about it. It's going to follow me around for a long time. I'm going to get annoyed by being typecast at some point. buy it. And so I really have to wake up in the morning, excited about it, go to bed at night, thinking about it. And a lot of that incubation happens when I'm not even meaning to focus my

attention on it, but it just draws me in. And then the second filter is it's got to be obviously useful to other people. But I haven't paid enough attention to is this novel. Do I have something unique to say about this topic? I've started a lot of projects that are, I think, exciting to me. They address things that matter to others. But we just don't need. another leadership book. I'm pretty convinced. I don't think we need another self-help book either on self-esteem for that matter, right? So thinking about, okay, how unique is the contribution that I could make here is something that I would like to spend more time on? And that's not occupying enough of my thinking time right now. Something that I love that you wrote about in your book,

and I in your latest book, and I relate to it so much because I released a book last fall, was that it can take two years to work on the book and write the book, and somebody can take somebody two hours to consume all of your ideas, right? But, you know, we receive these books, give and take, or originals or whatever, you know, think again. And they're elegant and they're very useful and very interesting and full of innovative ideas. But I imagine, I mean, you just mentioned the world doesn't need another leadership book. I have to imagine that in order for you to come up with an innovative book idea or innovative research ideas, you have to come up with a lot of ideas. I would not disagree with that. And most of those ideas you throw out the door, you reject.

Oh, hands down. I mean, one of my favorite practices for years has been I keep a little notebook in my back pocket, originally because it balanced out my wallet in the other back pocket. But I've carried it around since I was in college, and every time I have an idea, I write it down. And then once a week, I go through all the ideas and I type them up. And I do nothing with that document, except I open it once a month and I review it. And most of the content in there is embarrassing garbage. I'm like, who is the idiot who came up with these ideas? Wait, wait, that was a, that was a dumber version of me.

What was I thinking? But 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 different points in my life, it signals to me that there's something interesting and worth exploring there. And I think that for me is a process of deciding which ones ought to be discarded and which ones maybe are worth developing. You are, I mean, you've talked about this both on the TED stage and in your books. You are not a natural procrastinator. You are an A student, right? and you kind of poke fun of yourself for that because in your research, you actually discovered that procrastinators can sometimes be some of the most creative people, that procrastination is part of the creative process, which I love.

But I'm hyperboizing a little bit, but there's truth to that, right? I think there is, although I'm always worried when I talk about this, that people are going to take this as license, right? I've now just given you an excuse to procrastinate on everything, which is not my ambition. What I'm trying to accomplish is something more modest, which is to say we all procrastinate sometimes. Even those of us who are precrastinators and like to do things months ahead of schedule, sometimes we put things off. And if you're putting off a project or a problem because you're bored by it or you don't care about it, procrastination is not going to pay off. But in this research that Chi Hei, Shen, 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 were more likely to reframe the problem in fresh ways. And sometimes that allowed you to stumble onto a great creative insight. And so, yeah, I think it worked for Da Vinci, Epic Procrastinator. I've been told that Steve Jobs was a serious procrastinator by many of the people who worked closely with him. Lincoln and MLK both procrastinated on their most famous speeches.

You know what? Sometimes people come up with brilliant ideas, not in spite of that procrastination, but in part because of it. You know, I'm not comparing myself to any of those people, but oftentimes I can't write introductions for how I built this. And I will go to sleep and I'll start to think about ideas in bed. And then I'll wake up at five or six in the morning, four or five in the morning, with a few key words, and I've got it. I just, I needed that distance. Yeah, subconscious thought is often better at nonlinear processing, right? The problem with conscious thinking is we try to go from step A to step B to step C,

whereas your subconscious mind is much more likely to make these intuitive leaps that sometimes are taking you in an unproductive direction, but other times lead to these great eureka moments. And I think sometimes we need the time to get there. And for those of us who like to finish things and like to have a sense of progress and momentum, it does require resisting the impulse to just say, I want to do this now and maybe put it off waiting for a better idea to come. What are some strategies that you use when you run into roadblocks, when you hit a creative block? Or I hesitate to ask, do you ever have that experience where you just feel like nothing interesting is kind of coming out?

Are there people who don't? Because I'd really like to meet one of those people. Of course I do. Everyone has creative blocks. And for me, they usually come when I'm trying to rush an idea ahead before I've really put all the pieces together. And for a long time, I just, I beat myself up about that. And I would say, okay, you know what, I'm not creative. I'm, you know, most of my work is really synthesizing other people's ideas, which I failed to recognize is a form of creativity.

It's not the, you know, the breakthrough innovation that I normally think about when I think about creativity. But as one of my favorite organizational psychologist, Carl Weik, often puts it, creativity is just putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations. And so that ability to integrate is actually a skill. And when I'm when I'm blocked creatively, it usually means I haven't gathered enough pieces of that puzzle to put it together yet. And it's time to go off and read. It's time to do some research.

It's time to go out into the world and observe what's happening in some organizations that live in extreme version of what I'm trying to make sense of. And then at some point, what I typically find is I can try to get a little bit more curious. if that doesn't work about my own creative blocks. I'm like, okay, I'm a psychologist. This is a fascinating case for me to study. And I remember I was working on an article that I got completely stuck on a few years ago.

It was a productivity article, ironically enough. And I just, I was staring at the blinking cursor in front of me. And I started to wonder, like, why is this called a cursor? Is it because of the number of writers who have cursed it? Is that the origin story here? And as soon as I had that thought, it took me out of that, frustrated sort of closed-minded mode and into this kind of amused, lighthearted, curious mode, and I had a couple of ideas.

Earlier, I was talking with Powell Kodakia, founder of ClassPass, and Perry Chen, co-founder of Kickstarter. They were on a panel just before this. And, you know, Pyle did a lot of iterating in real time, right? She put her product out into the world. It didn't always work. She would get feedback, good and bad, from her partners and customers and make changes, and then reintroduced the product.

She went through five or six iterations of what class pass. eventually became. For Perry, it was different. It took them three years to come up with a product that they then delivered kind of fully formed. They made some minor adjustments here and there, but it was more or less what it is today. What do you think from your experience works better? I mean, do you think it's better to work out the kinks before you put something out into the world? Or do you think it's better to just put it out there and adjust? Well, my job as a social scientist is to not have opinions on those things, but instead look to the data and ask, what does the most rigorous evidence tell us? And I think this is a pretty well-kept secret still, that being a great entrepreneur is really just being a good scientist. When I say, think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to order a microscope or a telescope immediately. Although, Guy, I would enjoy it if you dressed up like Bill Nye more often. Okay. I feel like that would be a contribution to the world. Good. I'm going to hold you accountable to that, if you don't mind. But no, for me, thinking like a scientist means you don't let your ideas become your identity. And there was an experiment in Italy with startup founders a couple years ago that demonstrated the value of this. Hundreds of entrepreneurs were randomly assigned either to a control group or to a group that was taught to think like scientists. And that latter group, they were just told your strategy for your company, that's a theory about how the world works. When you talk to customers, that's a great opportunity to hone in on specific hypotheses. And then when you launch your product or service, just see that as an experiment to test your hypotheses. 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 than twice as likely to pivot. The poor entrepreneurs who hadn't learned to think like scientists, when they found out that their product launch or their service launch didn't go as planned, they got stuck in preacher or prosecutor mode. They basically doubled down and said, no, no, no, no, I was right. Let me prove to myself and everybody else that I made a good decision. And then they basically tried to ignore or dismiss or explain away their naysayers. The entrepreneurs who thought like scientists, they were basically confronted with evidence

that their hypotheses were wrong. And they said, okay, that experiment didn't work. Let me now iterate. Let me try rethinking my vision or my strategy. or I'm going to try to pursue a different market and hope I can find product market fit. And by doing that, right, they bought themselves flexibility. And so when I look at those data, it's pretty clear that the iterate, test, and learn approach is where we want to go. The open question that that I think raises that I don't have good data on yet is when, when is it soon enough?

When is it too soon? When is it too late to launch? That's what I wanted to ask you about, because there's so many examples. And you've had probably experienced this on your show work life. And certainly on how I built this, there's so many examples of a founder that we interview. And they stuck with it despite, I mean, Gary Hersberg and Stonyfield yogurt took him 10 years. I mean, they were broke. And it was failure after failure.

But they stuck with a product. It was great yogurt. And there are so many examples of this of founders who, despite the evidence to the contrary, stick with it. and eventually they succeed. But of course, we know that those are the stories we tell on how I built this. In many cases, it's a folly. So when do you know? When do you know to stick with it and to keep at it?

And when do you know to course correct? So I don't think you can know. I think there's a fine line between heroic persistence and stubborn stupidity. And it's usually after the fact that you get to tell which was which. And I think for every Gary whose persistence paid off, right, there are probably eight or nine entrepreneurs who were too busy worshipping at the altar of hustle and praying to the high priest of grid to, you know, to stop and say, hmm, maybe I should rethink this and then they regretted it. I think irrational persistence is a very high risk, maybe high return strategy. But I think the way that I would start to try to analyze, should I stick with it or should I let go, is with the research, what's called escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. So escalation of commitment happens when you make an initial choice. You start to get some negative feedback that signals maybe this was the wrong call, but you decide, you know what, if I invest more, I can turn the ship around.

And a lot of us do that. We think it's about sunk 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. So I convinced myself that there's still hope here yet. And what that means is if I'm the person who made the initial decision, I am compromised when it comes to making the later choice about whether to stay the course or whether to think again. And what that means is you need a network of people. I call them a challenge network, right? A group of thoughtful critics who you trust to give you that independent feedback and say, wait a minute, let me hold up a mirror so you can see your reflection more clearly.

your blind spots. And you can see that if you had not made the initial choice to go with this, that you might be stepping on the brakes right now. And I don't know that you always get the easier or the right answers from your challenge network. But independent feedback from multiple thoughtful critics, I think is the best source of data that you could gather. I mean, and you talk about this and think again. I mean, two classic examples. And I love, the stories you tell about these examples are BlackBerry and Blockbuster. Two hugely successful companies in their day that didn't. I mean, they were already hugely established brands, but they didn't course correct. Now, I think the danger of, I mean, particularly in the case

of the BlackBerry, right, you had a brilliant electrical engineer, Mike Lazaridis, who, you know, just pure science, right? He figured out that you could take what was essentially a two-way pager and turn that into a work email device that ignited the smartphone revolution. And then he felt in love with his baby. And the idea of the physical keyboard instead of the touchscreen, the idea that this device was for work emails instead of home entertainment, he really couldn't get himself to rethink his vision for that product and the strategy for the company. It is insane to me that when they were valued at over $70 billion, they still only made one product. They just had a bunch of variations on the BlackBerry, which is a great way to persist into obsolescence. And I guess one of the

things that I took away from from going deep into that story and and comparing it with the research is you have to be very careful when you become known for a product or a service because the more credit and publicity you get for it, the more attached you become to it and the more attached it becomes to you. It's a form of what Margaret Heffernan, who I know you know, Ted Speaker writer has written about will. It's kind of a form of willful blindness. I love this quote that you've got in the book from Ray Dalio, the hedge fund, because he talks about, I mean, you write about how a lot of the most innovative thinkers, they love being wrong. They actually love being wrong. You would say it rocks their intellectual world. Ray Dalio, he says, if I don't look back at the, you know, at the end of the year and think, you know, God, how stupid? I think you're saying like, how stupid was I? Then he's like, then I didn't learn anything or didn't learn much. 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. And I think there's even a case to be made that we should experience joy around being wrong. The most visible example of this that I've ever seen is the Nobel Prize winner, Danny Kahneman. I'm sure a lot of folks here I've read Thinking Fast and Slow, and Danny is, I think, one of the great social scientist in history. and I have seen him on multiple occasions, just put out a hypothesis, and then find out it was false, and light up with delight. And after seeing it a couple times, I finally asked him about it, and I said, Danny, there's something very strange going on here. It seems like you enjoy being wrong.

And he corrected me, as you would expect a Nobel Prize winner to do. He said, I don't know anyone who enjoys being wrong. I definitely don't enjoy being wrong. But I do enjoy finding out that I was wrong, because it means that I am now. less wrong than I was before. And all of a sudden, it hit me. This is why I was drawn to organizational psychology in the first place. The rush of finding out that one of my assumptions about leadership or people or culture was not correct or not complete, that was a moment of discovery.

And I said, oh, of course. Finding out that you were wrong, that means you've learned something. And Danny said, that's the only way I'm sure that I've learned anything. It reminds me of something that Brunee Brown talked about last night. I'm not mentioning all of your friends, right? I think you've got a book club with Bray Brown. But she mentioned something last night that struck me. She said, you know, people are more open to being wrong if they are fundamentally curious, which makes a lot of sense.

But is that a choice people? Do you think that's a choice people can make? Can they choose to be fundamentally curious? Can they choose to be joyful when they're wrong? Of course it's a choice. What would make you think it's not? I mean, I don't think it's easy for everybody to find joy in being wrong. I agree with that.

I don't think it's easy. But that doesn't mean we don't have discretion, right? That we don't have control over whether we seek it out or whether we basically accept our defensive response when somebody tells us that we were incorrect about something. And I think that one of the ways that you learn that curiosity and that humility is you experience pain from being wrong. a bunch of times. My first version of that that I remember, I think I was 12, and I was on the phone with my best friend, and we started arguing about a movie quote. And I had a nickname. I was called Mr. Facts. My friends did not consider this a term of endearment. They found it really irritating

that I, you know, collected lots of information. And of course, now I've turned that into a career, but that is another story. I, you know, I thought, okay, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to go, I have the movie, I'm going to go play it, and then I'll correct him. and I played it, and I found out that I was wrong. And I couldn't bring myself to admit it. And I started backpedaling, and he hung up the phone on me. I called him back, and he said, Adam, I won't talk to you until you admit you were wrong.

And all of a sudden, I was confronted with this reality that I could lose a friendship over not being able to say I was wrong. And ever since then, I've tried to do something whenever I find out that I might have been wrong. I read 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 Happy Gilmore. And I say, you're smart, I'm stupid, you're good looking, I'm not attractive. And it reminds me to laugh at myself and to keep acknowledging all the things that I screw up. So I keep learning. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Adam Grant.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So as part of this year's How I Built This Summit back in May, I spoke with organizational psychologist Adam Grant. And when we left off, I was asking Adam about failure. When we should admit we're wrong.

And as you'll hear, when we should stay committed and keep going. So here's the question about being wrong, right? Obviously, it's crucial. It's a fundamental part of the process of getting better and learning. But you also know through your interactions with young entrepreneurs at Wharton and beyond that there is a kind of leap of faith that many of them have to take. They have to be convicted in their ideas. Ideas that a lot of people are going to tell them won't work. I mean, you think about Airbnb.

When those guys came up with that idea, everybody said to them, who's going to stay in a stranger's house? You know, who's going to go into a stranger's car when Lyft and Uber started out, right? So you do have to, I mean, there is a fine line between bringing in that feedback, because sometimes everybody might be telling you you're wrong, but also believing that your idea could work. Yeah, I do think that's a tightrope walk for a lot of people. But I think it's not as much of a leap of faith as many people believe. Right. So, you know, let's take the example of Airbnb. You know, why did Brian and Joe get, you know, get excited to test this idea?

Because they had a problem they were trying to solve. And they knew that they were potential users. And they started to, you know, to socialize the idea. And they found some friends who were open to it. And all of a sudden you realize, well, there's a huge range of preferences in the population. There are some people who think you're insane when you tell them the idea. And there are other people who say, oh, it's kind of lead it, a little bit neat. It's like couch surfing, only I can vet the people whose couch I'm surfing beforehand,

which is probably better than the crazy people whose couches I slept on in college. And as you start to see that heterogeneity, you realize, okay, at minimum there's a market niche, and now I need to test it. I need to figure out how fixed it is, how much it could grow as it gains acceptance. And I don't think it becomes one giant leap of faith. I think you dip your toe in the water, and then you start to figure out how to swim, and you go in a little bit deeper. And then at some point by the time you are in the deep end and there are waves and sharks,

you've actually already figured out how to survive and protect yourself. Adam, a couple weeks ago, I interviewed Robert Refkin. It hasn't been produced yet. It's coming up as an episode later this summer. Robert is, as I think you know, the founder of Compass. It's a brokerage technology company, but now a traditional real estate brokerage. And it's really kind of taken over the country. I think it's a second or third largest in the U.S. now.

And initially, the business model was no commissions. It was every agent was paid a salary. And the consumer, the user would save money because the commission wasn't built into the price. That business model didn't work. And he had to change it. And he had to admit he was wrong. But by changing the business model, he actually, and he talks about this in the episode, he lost a lot of credibility with his original team and most of them left because they felt that he was abandoning the original

vision that they decided to join him on, that journey, right? And they left. And he was almost, he was almost thrown out. So he was right. He was proved right in the end. But how does a founder handle a situation like that? I mean, he knew, he truly believed he was right, but everybody around him didn't. And they left. I think where I would start on that is to say it's always easier to manage a situation like that proactively as opposed to reactively. And up front, what I would love to see a founder do is make a clear distinction between principles and policies. Right. So I would argue that Robert's principles were much more fundamental and more basic than do we give commission or not to real estate agents. I think the underlying principle is he didn't

want to treat people like, you know, like they were monkeys that needed to be incentivized. He wanted to value them like human beings and pay them a salary and not have to dangle carrots or use sticks to try to motivate them, right? But that is an assumption about human nature. It's a value you place on people. Whether a particular policy is the right way to express that value is an open question. It's waiting to be tested. And so I think if I were a founder in that situation, I would try to separate those two things out. I would say, look, I want to found this as a different kind of real estate company.

I want to put people first. I want to treat my agents as full employees. And, you know, I think one interesting way of doing that might be to experiment with a no-commission structure. That's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis that 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. And if you set it up that way, you don't have a mutiny when you change your policy. People say, oh, well, that wasn't the right way to put the principle into action. Now we're open to trying some others. Yeah. And he mentioned how, you know, initially he felt like he failed, right? And it was a scary time. And it took a few years to kind of rebuild.

And on our show, and you've talked about this on Work Life, too, failure is a constant theme. It's a theme of every episode. And we try to frame it as an on-ramp to success, you know, whether it's Robert Refkin or Stuart Butterfield, failing with his games company and pivoting into Slack, which was really not the plan. And there is a fetishization of failure, especially in Silicon Valley. Right. But people who are part of this summit are building things and they know that they may have to try something and fail in order to innovate. But failure after failure or even one significant failure, it can be hard to keep learning and growing from that without knowing whether,

you're ever going to get a break, right? You could become, you could become totally demoralized and paralyzed. I think one of the worst exports of Silicon Valley to the rest of the world is the idea that we should celebrate failure. Guy, I don't know about you. I have never wanted to throw a party when I crashed and burnt. I was not out there celebrating when I found out that this online social network that we started in 1999 could have been Facebook. 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. I mean, I was thrilled for Neil and Dave and their team,

but I wasn't like, yes, I screwed up that investment and now it's a badge of honor, right? Right. I think that maybe a more realistic option is to try to normalize failure, to recognize that it is a necessary part of the process of taking risks and trying to solve big problems, and that if you never fail,

it means you probably weren't aiming high enough. if your goals are always achievable, you have set your goals too low and you need a little bit of a shot of ambition, right? And that normalization will ask people to say, okay, you know what, I don't have to, you know, to build up a whole resume of failures that I'm going to be proud of, but I also don't have to be defined by those failures. One of the things that I love about and our intention with this summit is, is not just to sort of talk high level, but also talk about very actionable and practical. things, tools, advice, tips. And something that you've written about that I love is it's something you call the creative checkup, which you actually put on your calendar.

You recommend people schedule a creative checkup like you would schedule a medical checkup. So first of all, what is a creative checkup? It's something that I stumbled upon after too many years of students coming back after graduating from Wharton and saying, you know, I really wish you would have pushed me harder to rethink my career plans.

you told me not to go in investment banking. You told me I was not intrinsically interested in markets and that I was not going to find this to be, you know, a great learning experience. And I didn't listen. Like, I don't know how much harder I can push you. What I think you need instead is to hear this advice at the right time when you're open to it. And eventually what I started doing was I just all the students who I thought were making career choices they might later regret.

I said, you go to the doctor once or twice a year, even if nothing seems to be wrong. what if you did the same thing for your career? So 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, have I reached a learning plateau or a lifestyle plateau? Is this still the job that I wanted?

Am I on a path that I think is meaningful in light of my values today? And I have now started to think about the same process as applied to creativity. to ask, my favorite question to ask when I'm going through one of these creative checkups is to go to that challenge network, those thoughtful critics that I engage regularly, and ask them, okay, from all the ideas you've seen me put out in the past year, what is something that I should rethink? And one of the things I see is I'll ask seven or eight people of that question. And sometimes three different people will give me the same answer,

even though they don't know each other. And then I realize, okay, there is something big that I'm missing here. It sounds like it's a prescription to check in on yourself every few months to ask yourself a series of questions. And presumably it may not fundamentally change what you're doing, but it's designed to kind of spark some of that thinking. Exactly. And I think sometimes it focuses on ideas. Other times it's really a values checkup for me. And I think any founding team is probably in a good position. to do this where you pause and say, okay, we should have, 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. So let's rank order our most important value, our second and third, and then maybe a fourth and a fifth. And let's, once a year, pause and say, do we have the right values in the right order? And does the way we spend our time actually reflect those principles? So as a simple example for me, I made my list and it was generosity number one, excellence number two, integrity number three, and freedom number four. I was like, okay, I'm pretty happy with those values. All of a sudden, I realized learning is not on that list. And that was one of the reasons that I ended up starting a podcast was I had watched you, Guy,

and a couple of others who I thought were doing just brilliant work in audio. And what I was so struck by was how you got to make learning part of your job, that you pick the people that you wanted to learn from. You dug into their stories in their lives, and then you shared as you were learning, right, so that they could learn with you instead of from you in the audience. And I thought, okay, if I start a podcast, maybe that will give me an excuse to reach out to the people in the organizations I want to learn from. And now that's going to be a part of my work life. And it really recalibrated my value system. So that is something I would say, if you don't do it occasionally, it's at your own risk. I love that. And you're right.

You're absolutely right. I mean, I've been very fortunate throughout my career to learn, to be, you know, that's been my profession. I learn from people every day. I wonder, I mean, one of the ways that I, and clearly you find or you think about innovative ideas, you come up with innovative ideas, is by asking other people and bouncing them off other people and collaborating with people who you trust. and this has been a challenging past 15 months to do that because we are all in remote environments. How do you think, if collaboration is an engine for innovation, how do you think remote work is going to affect creative collaboration? I think it depends a lot on how we do it. So pre-pandemic, I think COVID has been the worst time to test remote work because we are in the middle of a pandemic. and many of us have been trying to be productive and creative while our kids are at home and online school at the same time. And the fact that we've been able to get anything done in those circumstances is a minor miracle. I think the much better tests are pre-COVID.

We had evidence, a meta-analysis, a study of studies showing this is even as early as 2007 with thousands of data points that as long as people were in the office half the week, if they had flexibility of the other half, they were more productive, more satisfied, higher retention. and no cost to relationships in any way, shape, or form. And so I think that that's where we need to be moving. We have lots of good experimental data like Nick Bloom at Sea Trip and China, showing that when you're randomly assigned to work from home, you're about 13 and a half percent more productive and half is likely to quit. We have also some now with in-person experiments, which show that if you test my productivity compared to my own productivity

when I'm at home versus not at home, I'm more productive at home, especially if I'm a working mother, it turns out. the big unanswered question is how do we keep creative collaboration going with that flexibility? And I think that's at the heart of the question that you just asked. I think that sometimes we overestimate how important collaboration is in creativity. I guess maybe one place we could look at this is in brainstorming. So, I remember March 2020 when everybody realized, whoa, we have big decisions to make and important creative problems to solve. What did everyone do?

We all got into Zoom and we said, all right, two. heads are better than one, five are better than two, let's have a group together brainstorming. Remember that? Yes. I was so excited to see that happen, except for one tiny wrinkle. It doesn't work. We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you would let them come up with ideas independently,

you get more ideas and also better ideas on average. And I don't think it's hard to figure out why. There are a couple of things that go wrong in group brainstorming consistently. one is production blocking. We can't all talk at once. Two is ego threat. I don't want to look like an idiot. So I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas. And then three is conformity, also known as the hippo effect. Hippo is the highest paid person's opinion, of course. And as soon as that's known, people jump on the bandwagon and we lose all these ideas. And those problems are amplified if you lack power or status. If you are the only woman of color in a team dominated by white men, if you're the only junior person in a room of senior people, If you're the introvert in a group of extroverts, it is that much harder to get heard. So good news is we can solve all those problems just by shifting from group brainstorming to individual brainwriting. Give people the prompt in advance. Let them come up with their own ideas.

And then when you've collected all the possibilities, let the group evaluate and refine. And that way you get the individual variety and brilliance. You also have the wisdom of crowds to figure out which of these are promising and which ones aren't. And it's my favorite thing about virtual collaboration. We have a chat window. I cannot tell you how many meetings I've run in the past 15 months where I've said, all right, here's the prompt. Let's take the first 10 minutes to jot down our ideas.

We'll submit them all in the chat, and then we can refine. Yeah. I mean, as you know, sometimes innovation happens by accident, right? The kid leaves the fruit juice outside in the middle of winter and the next morning. You've got popsicles. I think that was literally how popsicles were invented, right? somebody spills the chocolate chips into the sugar cookie batter and there's toll house cookies according to the back of the package.

But sometimes, oftentimes innovation happens because people really are thinking this through. Like, I can't remember his name, but one of the engineers at Apple who tried to put internet connectivity in the iPod, and that was the kind of early beginnings of what would become the iPhone. From what you have observed and your research, how do big organizations, because lots of people who are part of the summit are innovators within organizations. They're internal entrepreneurs, right? How do big organizations spur innovation? I mean, you mentioned this idea of allowing people to think individually on their own, but you still have to give people space to put their ideas out there. So how does that happen? How can big organizations encourage innovative thinking? So I'll throw out two ideas that I think have some good data behind them. The first one is something that I've seen both at Bridgewater and at Warby Parker.

It's a rethinking of the suggestion box. And instead of a suggestion box, they run problem boxes, where at Warby, it's just a Google Doc. Anytime you see something broken, it's usually a technical bug, but you could design yours to include management bugs or culture bugs, you submit that. And then they have people across the organization rate how important those problems are, which means you get feedback on whether you're raising critical issues. And then if you want to work on one of the important ones, you can make a part of your job to do that. You get a team and resources behind you. And that problem identification process is usually the beginning of an innovative solution. When you want to get more innovative solutions and higher quality solutions,

I think one of the best things you can do in a big organization is run an innovation tournament. A contest for ideas. And my favorite example was at Dow Chemical. They announced this tournament and they said, we're looking for ideas that will save energy and reduce waste. They have to cost no more than 200 grand US and be able to pay for themselves within a year if they work. And anybody in the company can submit. They have peers and subject matter experts evaluate and then promising proposals go to round two and then eventually they bet on them. Well, Dow ends up investing over a decade in 575 ideas. on average, they saved the company $110 million U.S. dollars a year. Wow.

Most of those ideas didn't come from people in creative jobs. They were, you know, somebody's on a factory floor, they see something that's broken. They had a kernel of an idea, but they did not know where to take it until the tournament was announced. It's amazing. I mean, it really does speak to this idea of crowdsourcing in a sense. It does. And I think that crowdsourcing needs structure in a well-designed innovation tournament. my colleagues, Christian Turvish and Carl Elrich 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 are much more able to figure out, okay, is this a viable idea? What are the appropriate parameters? And then you also have a timeline. Usually people get just a couple weeks to submit. And then over time, they get feedback and they can iterate and refine.

And what that does is it puts a little bit of discipline and real focus of energy and attention behind the innovation process, as opposed to saying, you know what, you're all busy with your jobs. We just, we want you to innovate on the side. You know, you may not have a strong perspective on it, but I'm just curious to see if you have thoughts on this, which is, you know, there are all kinds of different innovations that sometimes you think, God, you know,

the smartest people on earth are working on that. I mean, but at the same time, you know, you've got your Pat Browns. He's going to be on the show tomorrow night. and he's, you know, he's trying to create, he is creating meat out of plant protein. And I wonder, how do we create an incentive, more of an incentive for innovation, especially when it's not necessarily profitable? That's an interesting question. I wonder what makes you think we need more incentives for innovation?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think about, for example, the fact that. that this vaccine for COVID was invented in less than a year. And I don't know if that could have happened without the kind of financial backing from the federal government, right? Yeah, there is, I'm thinking about some of the mazicado data, which would suggest that federal government investment innovation in innovation is probably the single most underestimated and underappreciated driver of creativity and of entrepreneurship. And she's traced just incredible data sets around if governments, you know, put real financial backing behind new ideas in a particular area, how much easier it is than for people to see opportunities, to seize opportunities, to get support. And I think in some ways, in the U.S. at least, we have, we've delegated that responsibility to venture capitalists. And the problem with venture capitalists is they tend to invest in the ideas that are easy to 10x or more.

Yeah. 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. Can you imagine in 2019 any Silicon Valley VC saying, I'm going to invest in MRNA technology? No. It's not going to happen, right? So I think that we probably do need better federal support,

and I did not realize you were going to land me there, but well done. I love that work by, I think her name is Mariana, right, Mazikato? Yeah, exactly. She is, she's, and by the way, if you're watching, check out her. her TED Talk and her books. She's brilliant. I think she's based in the UK and she writes about how government has actually funded all of the things that private enterprise takes credit for, like the iPhone and the technology behind it. It's all funded by the federal government. One of the themes, Adam, that's emerged from this week so far is finding a middle ground

in what we do, right, like a balance between grit and vulnerability, between taking risks and hedging our bets between, you know, knowing when to walk away and knowing when to hold on. And you coined a term for how to strike this emotional balance when you're solving problems and coming up with new ideas and you call it confident humility. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that idea. Yeah, I think when it first started to crystallize from me, I was reading some research on how highly confident entrepreneurs and leaders could also be extremely humble. And it sounded like a contradiction. And then I started to read through some of the examples that came out of the data and I was like,

well, you are very ambitious and, you know, pretty self-assured that you can do great things, but you're also very aware of your own limitations and weaknesses. And you know you're human and you're fallible. And I started realizing that that's really the combination that I've seen in most of the great entrepreneurs that I've worked with and studied. And I remember a couple years ago asking both Reed Hoffman and Sarah Blakely, like, how did you have the confidence to just go for it. Like, Reid, you never built a company on your own, let alone, you know, LinkedIn. How did you know that it was time? How did you know you were ready?

How did you know you were capable? And Sarah, who, you know, I loved your interview with her. How did you know to go for it with Spanx when you'd never been an entrepreneur? You didn't know anything about retail or fashion or even really much about business by her own description. And they both gave me different versions of the same answer. They both told me that they weren't confident in their knowledge and skills. They were just confident in their ability to learn. And it just sort of clicked at that point. I said, okay, what we want are people who believe in themselves,

but they doubt their knowledge and their capabilities, and they believe they can figure it out tomorrow. And I think that the confidence part is familiar to a lot of founders. What we forget about is the humility part. When they hear humility, they think, oh, well, I don't want to be meek. I don't want to have low self-esteem. Right. But if you go back to the Latin root of humility, it translates to from the earth.

It's about being grounded. And I think we all need to be grounded, especially if our aspirations are sky high. There's confident humility, and then there's the confidence of Billy from the fire festival. And I think my son has a phrase for that, he put the con in confidence. Sad but true. I think, yeah, confidence without humility is just narcissism or arrogance, sadly. Adam, is there a shortcut for learning how to strike that kind of balance, that kind of confident humility? Because it seems like it's a constant undertaking.

It's a perpetual process. Yeah, I honestly am not sure that there are shortcuts to anything worth doing. I think any meaningful goal that you pursue, any strength of character or virtue that you want to develop, it ought to take work. It ought to be difficult. It ought to involve some struggle. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it. And so I'm hesitant to think that there might be a shortcut, but I think there definitely are habits and strategies. And I think one of those that I've been studying recently with one of our doctoral students, Konstantino's Kudifaris, is to not just ask people for criticism, but to criticize yourself out loud. One of the greatest marks that you are secure

in your own ego is that you're willing to talk about the things that you're not good at. 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 areas. And we find that when leaders and managers are randomly assigned to do that, they end up building much more psychological safety in their teams to take risks, to speak up, to bring new ideas and problems to the table, because they're not just claiming they're open to it. They are proving that they can take it. And when you hear somebody who's up on a pedestal or who's somewhere senior to you in the

hierarchy, say, you know what, here are the things I'm really terrible at. Here are the areas where I need your help. It goes a long way toward motivating you to speak up. And I think it's the people around us who keep us humble and keep us in check. That's Adam Grant. We talked back in May as part of the How I Built This 2021 Virtual Summit. There are more conversations like this one from the How I Built This Summit in your podcast feed right now, including my live interviews with Brne Brown and Gary Vaynerchuk.

And next week, you'll hear my conversation with Rashad Robinson. This episode was produced by James Delahousie with music composed by Rumtin Ereblewe. Our production staff for the summit includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Farah Safari, Liz Metzker, Janet Ujong Lee, Annalise Ober, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Ali Prescott, Joanna Palovska, and Jessica Goldstein. Our intern is Harrison V.J. Choi, and Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.