 In 2009, one of the founders of the
online eyeglass maker Warby Parker approached management
consultant Adam Grant about becoming an early investor. Grant
says he declined because the company's founders weren't working
at their startup full time; he also says it was the worst
financial decision he's ever made.
"I thought to be an entrepreneur you have to be a risk-taker and
you have to be all in," Grant tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And
what I didn't realize at the time was, first of all, successful
entrepreneurs are much more likely to play it safe and have
back-up plans than failed entrepreneurs; and secondly, all of
the time they spent working on other things was giving them the
freedom to do something really original. If they had just gone
in and started the company, they would have felt the pressure to
release their product immediately. Instead, they had the time to
figure out that they needed a home try-on program to get people
to make the leap and order glasses online."
Today Grant teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton
School, and he spends his days looking at who and what make
businesses successful. His new book is called Originals: How
Non-Conformists Move the World.
Interview Highlights
On what a person's Internet browser says about their level of
nonconformity
I love this study. So I'm sitting at a conference one day and
this economist, Mike Housman, presents a study showing that we
can predict your job performance and your commitment at work
just by knowing what Web browser you use. And I was stunned to
find out that people who use Chrome and Firefox — this is in
customer service and call center jobs — were better performers
on the job. They also, on average, stayed around in those jobs
15 percent longer than their poor Internet Explorer and Safari
peers.
And a lot of people hear this study and think: Well, great, if I
want to get better at my job I should just download a new
browser. Not quite the point, right? The point is: What browser
you use signals something about the way that you tend to live
your life. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you have to download
those browsers; whereas Safari and Internet Explorer — they come
pre-installed on your computer, they're they default. And if
you're the kind of person who just accepts the default, you tend
not to take as many original steps as the rest of us.
If you're somebody who had that instinct to say, you know, "I
wonder if there's a better browser out there," that's just a
tiny clue that you might be the kind of person who's willing to
reject other defaults in your life too.
On his advice for making a job more satisfying
It's called job crafting. A couple colleagues and I studied this
at Google and we found that there were all sorts of ways that
they could make modifications to their own jobs that made them
more meaningful, more motivating, and still allowed them to be
very effective. There was one person who really, really hated
working on spreadsheets and she found someone else on her team
who loved spreadsheets. And they were able to do a little bit of
a task swap and everyone was a bit more efficient and more
effective.
You have to earn status before you can exercise that kind of
power. So what that means is you have to demonstrate that you're
excelling in your job at first, and then what most managers do
is they give leeway. It's called idiosyncrasy credits —
basically the freedom to deviate. You get that if you've ended
up being a star performer.
On why experience isn't necessarily a good thing when you're
trying to cultivate creativity
I think this happens to all of us: The more familiar you become
with a domain, the more you tend to see things just like
everyone else and get stuck or entrenched in one particular way
of doing things. So if you study, for example, fashion
designers, the most original fashion collections come from the
designers who have not only traveled abroad, but who have spent
the most time working abroad in countries that are maximally
different from their own. And they're able to re-combine all
sorts of new insights from different cultures to create
different designs.
Of course, not everyone is going to go and work abroad, but is
there a chance to rotate to a different job and gain a little
bit of familiarity with a skill that you haven't tested before?
That's the kind of stretching that helps people ultimately
become more original.
On the importance of having artistic hobbies
If you study Nobel Prize-winning scientists, one of the things
that differentiates them from their peers is that they're way
more likely to have artistic hobbies. Galileo is one of my
favorite examples of this. One of his great discoveries was he
was the first to spot mountains on the moon. And he was looking
through a telescope at an image that many of his peers had seen
as well. The only reason he spotted it was because he was
trained in a particular drawing technique that led him to
recognize some of the patterns as mountains. And I think there
are all kinds of connections we can draw between artistic
engagements in our hobbies and in our leisure time and the
actual work we do if only we paid attention to them. |
