PDF Summary:Originals, by Adam Grant

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This doesn’t mean they take moderate risks in all dimensions - instead, having one foot in stability allows more radical risks in the other, creating a balanced risk portfolio. The stability prevents the pressure of desperately launching half-baked ideas and publishing manuscripts that aren’t ready. In general, entrepreneurs prefer calculated, managed risks, rather than wild, dangerous, reckless risks.

Originals do NOT fearlessly go forward, as much as the media (and they) want you to believe. They face fear of failure and anxiety. Martin Luther King, Jr and Copernicus alike felt concern over taking on the duties expected of them.

Originals are NOT natural non-conformists who ignore social approval. Studies of entrepreneurs suggest concern for pleasing others wasn’t a predictor of success.

To start being an Original, consider why the world exists as it does, and how you might improve it with a new idea.

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Similarly, your target users will openly tell you how your idea will fit into their lives and whether it might be pointless. (However, it’s important that users be observed in a natural environment, rather than a focus-group like setting, where they have an artificially heightened sense of criticism.)

When inverted, the traits that make your colleagues so accurate also make others deceptively poor evaluators.

• Someone with deep domain expertise in one area can get overconfident in other areas, ignoring that her expertise doesn’t transfer over. This is exacerbated if the environment is changing rapidly, so that prior experience points in the wrong direction. Her intuition is no good here; deep thorough analysis is required instead.
• A personal stake in an idea’s success (eg a manager) exposes one to a host of biases (confirmation, sunk cost, consistency) and make them risk averse.
• People who rely too much on their intuition also get swayed by shows of external passion, which may not be a good predictor of internal passion or success in general.

Many evaluators also suffer from analysis by analogy - comparing a new idea to previous successes. If a new idea...

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• It makes you appear smarter. Presenters who don’t explicitly consider counter-arguments seem to have done only a cursory analysis. By pointing out possible weaknesses, you don’t look naive.
• You seem more trustworthy. You seem honest and modest, instead of a trickster trying to deceive the audience.
• It puts the listener in a position to help, not to attack. Seeing weaknesses automatically makes one consider how to overcome them. Furthermore, the listener is biased to like her own favorite solutions to the ideas, making the weaknesses seem more surmountable.
• It itemizes the weaknesses. If you show your 8 greatest weaknesses and only 2 of them seem really serious, it doesn’t seem like a bad situation after all - “there are only 2 weaknesses!”
  • This is more effective than focusing on just your 1 big weakness, since the listener is left wondering what other problems lurk under the surface.
• Through recency bias, it becomes harder for the listener to come up with novel weaknesses. The ones you’ve presented are fixated on.

Third, speak to the top and bottom of the totem pole. People in different social levels have varying receptivity to new ideas. People...

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The data suggest otherwise - “pioneer” companies failed at a rate of 47%, compared to “settler” companies at 8%. Furthermore, pioneers captured just 10% of market share, compared to 28% for settlers. (Shortform note: To be specific, from the original paper, failure means the end of sales for a product. It wasn’t clear if the market share was only for surviving pioneers, or also included failed pioneers (thus counting as 0% share).)

Settler companies benefit from the path that pioneers pave, by:

• Improving upon the technology of pioneers. Settlers often don’t just imitate the pioneer - they introduce something novel that causes customers to switch over. Instead of exploring broadly about what the customer wants, the settler can focus more narrowly how to provide superior quality and value.
• Being able to strike when the timing is right. Pioneers introduce a new concept, but the world may not yet be ready for it. Settlers can nurture that same concept and unleash it when the conditions are more hospitable.
• Avoiding the overcommitment of pioneers. With no one to guide them and the first-mover-advantage myth...

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Furthermore, as you try to build partnerships with other causes, don’t overlook shared tactics, even if your missions are orthogonal. Coalitions who can learn methods from each other band together, perhaps with one teaching fundraising and the other political advocacy.

If at the end your cause is too radical, try focusing on the how instead of the why. The why may clash with deep-seated convictions and cause automatic defensiveness. Consider uBeam founder Meredith Perry, who recruited engineers to build a wireless battery charger. When leading with the desired outcome of wireless charging, engineers rejected it as implausible. Instead, she had much better success when she focused on the specifications - “build a transducer with these performance characteristics.” When the purpose was hidden from sight, the engineers had less bias about its chance of success.

(Shortform note: The inverse might also work if the means are what is controversial. Here, talk about the why first - entice the listener with a vision of the future they can get behind, then describe what it’ll take to get there. In Carmen Medina’s case, she could have tried first describing the benefits of instantaneous...

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(The effect seems to be strongest in a middle range of age distance. If separated by just a year, the younger child can hold her own; if separated by 10 years, the firstborn’s niche is open again.)

Another explanation comes from caretaker effects. The firstborn is usually cared for strongly by parents, who have the anxiety of firsttime parents as well as the energy of youth. As the parents have more children, they relax due to more experience and declining energy with age. The older children also then take up a greater share of the care, but they enforce fewer rules than parents would. Finally, older children become more responsible and capable of handling chores, leaving the youngest kids free to roam. For all these reasons, the lastborn thus experiences relatively more freedom.

These are general trends, because most parents probably react to birth order predictably in the ways stated above. But some unique situations may contravene this trend - for instance, if the parents exert even more pressure on laterborn children.

• Andre Agassi was the last of 4 children of a father who wished to raise a tennis superstar. When the first 3 children failed to show...

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Others proposed that groupthink came from the practice of withholding criticism during brainstorming. This, too, was rejected: a study found that groups that debated generated more unique ideas than those that didn’t, since even incorrect dissenting opinions can be useful.

Instead of a desire for social cohesion, the more important cause of groupthink seems to be overconfidence, and how actively dissenting voices are encouraged and rewarded in the company. The more you suffer from confirmation bias, the more susceptible the company is to decay.

• Polaroid’s CEO was infamously closed to criticism, stressing the party line about the enduring demand for print photography and insulating his pet projects like instant video. They were overconfident about their ability to predict the future, and married to the large profit margins from selling film.

In contrast, Ray Dalio’s hedge fund Bridgewater Associates is famous for its principles of radical transparency. In finance, markets don’t care about ego or popularity - whoever’s right will make money, and nonconsensus opinions have the potential for greater profit. Thus surfacing unpopular and controversial, but possibly...

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• Force the group to rank order the alternatives, instead of just picking the best one.

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Strength in Numbers

When working on controversial ideas, there is strength in numbers. “The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

No one wants to be the lone dissenter, castigated by all. In the famous Asch experiments, people who worked independently made errors was less than 1%. When confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer, 37% of responses became incorrect. 75% of participants gave at least one incorrect answer. But when a single confederate dissented, the error rate dropped down to 5.5 %.

Make people feel less alone when supporting an unpopular idea. In dictatorship overthrows in the Middle East, dissenters guarded their opinions, scared of being disappeared if they became too public vocally. To combat this:

• The rebellion strategists used public symbols of closed fists to give the impression that other rebels existed, even if they weren’t publicly visible.
• Instead of outward public dissent, they organized peaceful protest signals, like turning their lights on and off at a predetermined time, or carrying their TVs in wheelbarrows.

Outsourcing Inspiration

When...