“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. . . .
The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
Nelson Mandela
n 2007, a lawyer named Lewis Pugh plunged into the Arctic Sea wearing only a Speedo, a swim cap, and goggles. The ice had melted to the point
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that it was no longer frozen solid, and his plan was to become the first person ever to survive a long-distance swim across the North Pole. Hailing from England and South Africa, Pugh had served in the British Special Air Service and worked as a maritime lawyer before becoming the best cold- water swimmer on the planet. Two years earlier, he had broken a world record for the northernmost long-distance swim in frigid seas. Later that same year, he broke the southernmost record by leaping off an iceberg to swim a full kilometer in Antarctica.
Pugh, who has been called a human polar bear, is capable of a feat that has never been documented in another human: Before a swim, his core body temperature elevates from 98.6°F to 101°F. His sports scientist coined a term for it, “anticipatory thermogenesis,” and it appears to be the fruit of decades of Pavlovian conditioning: When it’s time to plunge into frosty waters, his body automatically prepares. Pugh calls it the art of self-heating. But unlike many world-class athletes, he does not consider it his mission simply to be the best in the world or to prove what’s possible. He is an ocean advocate, an environmentalist who swims to raise awareness about climate change.
The passengers on the Titanic perished in 41°F water. In Pugh’s Antarctic swim, the water temperature was at the freshwater freezing point of 32°F. At the North Pole he was facing something even more lethal: less than 29°F. After falling into that water, a British explorer had lost fingers due to frostbite in only three minutes; Pugh’s team estimated that his swim would require almost twenty. Two days before the big effort, Pugh took a dip for a five-minute practice swim, and afterward he couldn’t feel his entire left hand or any of the fingers on his right—and he wouldn’t again for four more months. The cells in his fingers burst, and he was hyperventilating.
Instead of visualizing success, Pugh began to imagine failure. Great depths don’t normally hold any fear for me, but this is different, he thought. If he failed, he would die, and his body would sink more than two and a half miles to the bottom of the Arctic. Paralyzed by fear, he began to question whether he could survive. Would he have been better off envisioning the best-case scenario?
This chapter examines the emotional drama involved in going against the grain. In my own research at a health-care company, I tested how much employees knew about effective strategies for managing emotions, comparing their responses to expert ratings on how best to handle emotionally challenging situations like being demoted from a job, being nervous before a major presentation, getting blamed for a mistake, and having teammates turn in shoddy work. Those who aced the emotion regulation test spoke up more often with ideas and suggestions to challenge the status quo—and their managers rated them as more effective in doing so. They marshaled the courage to rock the boat and mastered the techniques for keeping it steady.
To understand these skills, I’ll consider how Pugh heated up to brave icy waters and Martin Luther King, Jr., prepared civil rights activists to keep their cool. I’ll also explore how a group of activists overthrew a dictator and a technology leader convinced engineers to make a radical change to their product. By studying effective strategies for managing emotions, you’ll discover when it’s better to plan like an optimist or a pessimist, whether calming yourself down can fight fear and venting can quench anger, and what it takes to maintain your resolve when the odds are against you.
Although many originals come across as beacons of conviction and confidence on the outside, their inner experiences are peppered with ambivalence and self-doubt. When outstanding U.S. government leaders described their most difficult decisions, they reported struggling not with complex problems, but with choices that required courage. And new research led by Rice professor Scott Sonenshein indicates that even the most dedicated environmentalists wrestle with constant uncertainty about whether they can succeed in their mission. Choosing to challenge the status quo is an uphill battle, and there are bound to be failures, barriers, and setbacks along the way.
Psychologist Julie Norem studies two different 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. If you’re a defensive pessimist, about a week before a big speech you convince yourself that you’re doomed to fail. And it won’t be just ordinary failure: You’ll trip on stage and then forget all your lines.
Most people assume it’s better to be a strategic optimist than a defensive pessimist. Yet Norem finds that although defensive pessimists are more anxious and less confident in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks, they perform just as well as strategic optimists. “At first, I asked how these people were able to do so well despite their pessimism,” Norem writes. “Before long, I began to realize that they were doing so well because of their pessimism.”
In one experiment, Norem and a colleague asked people to throw darts after being randomly assigned to picture a perfect performance, envision a bad performance, or relax. Defensive pessimists were about 30 percent more accurate in their dart throws when they thought about negative outcomes rather than imagining positive outcomes or relaxing. In another experiment, on a tracing task that demanded focus and accuracy, defensive pessimists were 29 percent more accurate when they were not encouraged than when they were told they would probably do very well. (Those same
words of encouragement boosted the performance of strategic optimists by 14 percent.) And in preparing a mental math test that required adding and subtracting in their heads (calculations like 23 - 68 + 51), defensive pessimists scored about 25 percent higher when they made a list of the worst things that could happen in the test and how they would feel than when they distracted themselves.
“Defensive pessimism is a strategy used in specific situations to manage anxiety, fear, and worry,” Norem explains. When self-doubts creep in, defensive pessimists 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 make sure they don’t crash and burn, which enables them to feel a sense of control. Their anxiety reaches its zenith before the event, so that when it arrives, they’re ready to succeed. Their confidence springs not from ignorance or delusions about the difficulties ahead, but from a realistic appraisal and an exhaustive plan. When they don’t feel anxious, they become complacent; when encouraged, they become discouraged from planning. If you want to sabotage the performance of chronic defensive pessimists, just make them happy.
Lewis Pugh was usually an optimist; he saw possibilities where others wouldn’t and persevered when others would give up. But in the weeks before major swims, he often operated like a defensive pessimist. Much of his inspiration came not from the high expectations of his own team, but from the discouragement of doubters. Two years earlier, when gearing up for his record-breaking northern swim, he had been fueled by an outdoorsman telling him it was impossible and he would die. Before another big swim, he reminded himself of skeptics and imagined them gloating to their friends that he couldn’t achieve it. “Being the first to undertake a swim is exponentially harder than going second. You don’t know what will happen. The fear can be crippling,” he writes.
As Pugh stood shaking at the North Pole, his instincts warned him of “the calamity that was about to unfold.” But instead of trying to cheer up, he found that his negative thinking “shows where things can go wrong, and it gets rid of complacency.” Considering the worst-case scenario impelled him to prepare thoroughly and mitigate against every single possible risk.* He started formulating plans to spend less time on the ice before the swim
and return to the boat immediately afterward. “The trick is to make fear your friend,” he notes. “Fear forces you to prepare more rigorously and see potential problems more quickly.” That was an important step, but it wasn’t enough to keep him going. As you’ll see, defensive pessimism is a valuable resource when commitment to the task is steadfast. But when commitment flutters, anxiety and doubt can backfire.
When ordinary people list their fears, one tends to be more common than death: public speaking. As Jerry Seinfeld jokes, “If you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
If we want to understand how to manage fear, we don’t have to threaten people’s lives; we need only threaten to put them on stage. Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, asked college students to deliver a persuasive speech on why they would make good collaborators at work. A critical experimenter sat in the audience, and all the speeches were videotaped. A committee of peers would be enlisted later to evaluate each speaker’s persuasiveness and confidence. With only two minutes to prepare, many of the students were visibly shaking.
If you were in this situation, how would you manage your fear? When Brooks asked three hundred working Americans to offer advice on this matter, the most popular recommendation was “Try to relax and calm down.” This is the most obvious suggestion, favored by more than 90 percent of professionals. Yet it isn’t the best one.
Before the college students gave their speeches, Brooks asked them to speak three words out loud. She randomly assigned them to say either “I am calm” or “I am excited.”
That one word—calm versus excited—was sufficient to significantly alter the quality of their speeches. When students labeled their emotions as excitement, their speeches were rated as 17 percent more persuasive and 15 percent more confident than those of students who branded themselves calm. Reframing fear as excitement also motivated the speakers, boosting the average length of their speeches by 29 percent; they had the courage to
spend an extra thirty-seven seconds on stage. In another experiment, when students were nervous before taking a tough math test, they scored 22 percent better if they were told “Try to get excited” instead of “Try to remain calm.”
But is reframing fear as excitement the best way to cope with nerves? To find out whether it’s better to just acknowledge anxiety, Brooks gave students another frightening task: She asked them to sing eighties rock music in public.
Standing in front of a group of peers, students belted out the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’” into a microphone. A voice recognition program on the Nintendo Wii automatically scored their performance on an accuracy scale from 0 to 100 percent, assessing volume, pitch, and note duration. They would earn a bonus for high scores. Before they started singing, she randomly assigned the students to say “I am anxious” or “I am excited.”
A control group who said nothing prior to performing averaged an accuracy score of 69 percent. Labeling the emotion as anxiety reduced accuracy to 53 percent. Instead of helping them accept fear, it reinforced that they were afraid. Calling it excitement was enough to spike accuracy to 80 percent.
To overcome fear, why does getting excited work better than trying to calm yourself down? Fear is an intense emotion: You can feel your heart pumping and your blood coursing. In that state, trying to relax is like slamming on the brakes when a car is going 80 miles per hour. The vehicle still has momentum. Rather than trying to suppress a strong emotion, it’s easier to convert it into a different emotion—one that’s equally intense, but propels us to step on the gas.
Physiologically, we have a stop system and a go system. “Your stop system slows you down and makes you cautious and vigilant,” explains Quiet author Susan Cain. “Your go system revs you up and makes you
excited.” Instead of hitting the stop switch, we can motivate ourselves to act in the face of fear by pressing the go switch. Fear is marked by uncertainty about the future: We’re worried that something bad will happen. But because the event hasn’t occurred yet, there’s also a possibility, however slim, that the outcome will be positive. We can step on the gas by focusing
on the reasons to move forward—the sliver of excitement that we feel about breaking loose and singing our song.
When we’re not yet committed to a particular action, thinking like a defensive pessimist can be hazardous. Since we don’t have our hearts set on charging ahead, envisioning a dismal failure will only activate anxiety, triggering the stop system and slamming our brakes. By looking on the bright side, we’ll activate enthusiasm and turn on the go system.
But once we’ve settled on a course of action, when anxieties creep in, it’s better to think like a defensive pessimist and confront them directly. In this case, instead of attempting to turn worries and doubts into positive emotions, we can shift the go system into higher gear by embracing our fear. Since we’ve set our minds to press forward, envisioning the worst-case scenario enables us to harness anxiety as a source of motivation to prepare and succeed. Neuroscience research suggests that when we’re anxious, the unknown is more terrifying than the negative. As Julie Norem describes it, once people have imagined the worst, “they feel more in control. In some sense, they’ve peaked in anxiety before their actual performance. By the time they get to the event itself they’ve taken care of almost everything.”
In every previous cold-water swim, Lewis Pugh had the unshakable conviction that he could succeed, so the defensive pessimist strategy was effective: analyzing the potential hazards left him as prepared as possible. At the North Pole, that approach worked initially, but after the disastrous test swim, “[m]y belief system was splintered. If five minutes in this
water had caused so much pain and damage to my hands, what would twenty minutes do?” He couldn’t shake the fear that the swim could be deadly: “What I felt on that stupid test swim wasn’t like anything I’d felt before. I don’t believe I can do this.”
With his commitment wavering, it was time to shift away from defensive pessimism and activate the go system by focusing on the reasons to do the swim. A friend gave him three ideas to get excited: First, they would plant national flags at key markers along the way to remind Pugh of the twenty-nine people from ten countries who helped make the swim possible. In earlier swims, Pugh had been “motivated by those who doubted you,” but now, his friend said, he should “focus on those people who believe in you, who have inspired you.” Second, he should look back and remember how his parents inspired him to care about protecting the
environment. And third, he should look ahead and think of the legacy he could establish to fight climate change. “After listening to him, the idea of abandoning the swim disappeared,” Pugh reflects. He dove into the frigid water and started swimming against the current. Eighteen minutes and fifty seconds later, he successfully finished—and sustained no physical damage. Three years after that, he swam across the highest lake on Mount Everest.
Whereas Pugh’s biggest hurdle was regulating his own fear, many originals have to manage other people’s emotions. When others are afraid to act, how can we activate their go systems?
In the summer of 2009, fifteen young tourists made a pilgrimage to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. After walking them around the city’s square, the tour guide, a lanky Serbian in his midthirties, regaled them with stories about the country’s recent history of inflated potato prices, free rock concerts, and wars with neighboring countries. But as the guide sprinkled his comments about Serbia with references to Monty Python humor and Tolkien fantasies, the tourists grew impatient. They weren’t just an ordinary group of travelers. They had come to Belgrade to learn how to overthrow their own country’s dictator.
Searching for a way to fight back against a tyrant, they asked the tour guide about how his countrymen had defeated the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. You don’t need to take big risks, the guide told them. You can demonstrate your resistance in small ways—drive slower than usual, throw Ping-Pong balls onto the streets, or put food coloring in fountains to make the water look different. The foreigners scoffed at his advice: such trivial actions wouldn’t make a dent in an iron curtain. It can never happen in our country, a man insisted. If we stand up to him, a woman challenged, our dictator will simply make us vanish. How can we even plan a revolution, when he has made it illegal to gather in groups of more than three?
They didn’t know it, but the tour guide had heard all these objections before. He heard them in 2003 from Georgian activists, in 2004 from Ukrainian activists, in 2005 from Lebanese activists, and in 2008 from Maldivian activists. In each case, they overcame fear and apathy and took down their respective dictators.
The tour guide, Srdja Popovic, had trained them all.
Popovic was one of the masterminds behind Otpor!, the grassroots youth nonviolence movement that overthrew Milosevic. A decade earlier, he had suffered through ethnic cleansing and martial law, and gaped in horror as his mother’s building was bombed. He was arrested, jailed, and beaten; his life flashed before his eyes when an officer of the law jammed a pistol into his mouth.
When psychologist Dan McAdams and his colleagues asked adults to tell their life stories and plotted their emotional trajectories over time, they discovered two different desirable patterns. Some people had consistently pleasant experiences: they were content throughout the major periods of their lives. The people who had been recognized for making original contributions to their communities shared many more stories that started negatively but surged upward: they struggled early and triumphed only later. Despite being confronted with more negative events, they reported greater satisfaction with their lives and a stronger sense of purpose. Instead of merely enjoying good fortune all along, they endured the battle of turning bad things good—and judged it as a more rewarding route to a life well lived. Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning. “Proper revolutions are not cataclysmic explosions,” Popovic observes. “They are long, controlled burns.”
After working with friends to lead the movement that toppled Milosevic and brought democracy to Serbia, Popovic dedicated his life to preparing activists to lead nonviolent revolutions. In 2010, the fifteen foreigners he trained a year earlier used his methods to overthrow the Egyptian dictator. Not every group has succeeded, but we can learn a lot from Popovic’s approaches to conquering fear, overcoming apathy, and channeling anger.
His first step mirrors how a technology leader dealt with fear among his employees.
When Josh Silverman took the reins of Skype in February 2008, the company was facing significant challenges. Employee morale was
plummeting as the company was failing to maintain the explosive growth that Skype had experienced after pioneering free computer-to-computer calls and cheap long-distance calls between phones and computers.
Silverman decided to make a big bet on an original feature: full-screen video calls. In April, he announced a moon-shot goal to release Skype 4.0 with the video feature by the end of the year. “The emotion among many employees was passionately negative. A lot of people thought it was too big a change, and we were going to kill the company,” Silverman recalls. They worried that the timeline was too short, video quality would be poor, and users would hate a full-screen format.
Instead of trying to calm them down, Silverman decided to psych them up by developing a Skype vision that would get them inspired about video. At a series of all-hands meetings, he emphasized the impact of the product on people’s lives, articulating a vision that he later formalized during a conversation with actor and technology investor Ashton Kutcher. “It’s not about making cheap phone calls. It’s about being together when you’re not in the same room.”
When originals come up with a vision for transforming anxiety into excitement, they usually take it upon themselves to communicate it. But just because it’s your idea doesn’t mean you’re the best person to activate the go system. In a series of experiments, Dave Hofmann and I found that the most inspiring way to convey a vision is to outsource it to the people who are actually affected by it. Consider university fund-raisers, who are often extremely nervous about calling alumni, interrupting their dinners, and asking them to donate money. When two leaders spoke passionately to them about how the money they were being asked to solicit would make a difference, the callers didn’t become any more effective.
The amount of money the average caller raised more than tripled, however, when leaders outsourced inspiration to a scholarship student, who described how the callers’ efforts had enabled him to afford university tuition and study abroad in China. On average, callers went from raising under $2,500 in the two weeks before the student spoke to over $9,700 in the two weeks after.* They were suspicious of the leaders, who clearly had the ulterior motive of convincing them to work harder. When the same message came from a scholarship student, they found it more authentic, honest, and truthful. They empathized with the student, and instead of being
anxious about asking for money, they were excited to solicit donations to help more students like him.
This doesn’t mean, though, that leaders need to step out of the picture altogether. In later studies, I found that people are inspired to achieve the highest performance when leaders describe a vision and then invite a customer to bring it to life with a personal story. The leader’s message provides an overarching vision to start the car, and the user’s story offers an emotional appeal that steps on the accelerator.
At Skype, Josh Silverman knew the best way to activate the go system wasn’t through his words alone. After talking about how Skype enabled his own children to have a deep personal relationship with their grandparents despite living eight time zones apart, he breathed life into the vision by giving the floor to Skype users as a regular feature of his all-hands meetings. A married couple shared how they survived a yearlong separation during their engagement “only thanks to daily talks on Skype.” A serviceman spoke about how Skype had allowed him to maintain a close relationship with his children while serving in Iraq; they even opened Christmas presents together. “Bringing the customer into the room connected them to the mission, and reached their hearts and minds,” Silverman says. “It helped employees see what a difference we could make in the world.”
As they grasped that Skype was about connecting people, the team’s anxiety gave way to excitement. Inspired to build a video feature that would enable more meaningful conversations, they shipped Skype 4.0 on schedule with high-quality, full-screen video calls. Soon, Skype was adding about 380,000 users per day; by the end of the last quarter of the year, more than a third of the 36.1 billion computer-to-computer minutes spent on Skype were video calls. Less than three years after Silverman shared his vision and brought in users to inspire the team, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, a 300 percent climb in value.
In Serbia, Srdja Popovic and his friends launched the Otpor! revolution by outsourcing inspiration. They knew that the words of a charismatic leader wouldn’t suffice to overcome the terror inflicted by a violent dictator. Many qualified candidates were too afraid to put their lives on the line, and even if one could be found, Milosevic could squash the resistance by making that brave soul disappear. So, instead of appointing a leader to
activate the go system, Popovic outsourced inspiration to a symbol: a black clenched fist.
The effort began in the fall of 1998, when Popovic and his friends were college students. They spray painted three hundred clenched fists around the town square and plastered stickers of the image throughout buildings in Belgrade. Without that fist, he says, the revolution would never have happened.
In the spring of 2010, a year after training the Egyptian activists, Popovic stopped cold in front of a newspaper stand. The clenched fist of Otpor! was featured on a front page, pictured on a poster held by a woman under the headline “The Fist Shakes Cairo!” The Egyptian activists had chosen to galvanize their own go systems by outsourcing inspiration to the same symbol. What made the fist so energizing?
In a classic experiment, psychologist Solomon Asch asked people to judge the lengths of different lines. Imagine that you’re brought into a room with seven other people and are shown the following images:
Your task is to look at the line on the left and decide whether line A, B, or C is the same length. The correct answer is obviously B, and everyone in the group provides it. You all agree in the next round, too. Then comes the third trial:
The right answer in this case is clearly C. But strangely, the first person in your group insists it’s B. You’re stunned when the second person picks B as well. The third and fourth group members call out B, too. What would you do?
The other people in your group are confederates in cahoots with the research team. There are eighteen trials in total, and the others have been instructed to intentionally give the wrong answer on twelve of them, to determine if you’ll go against your better judgment and follow the majority. Over a third of the time, participants conformed: They chose the line they knew didn’t match just because the rest of the group did. Three quarters of participants conformed at least once with a wrong answer.
When they were tested alone, people virtually never erred. When they went along with the group, they knew they were giving an incorrect answer, but they were afraid of being ridiculed. It doesn’t take a violent dictator to silence us through fear. Just flying solo with an opinion can make even a committed original fearful enough to conform to the majority.
The easiest way to encourage non-conformity is to introduce a single dissenter. As entrepreneur Derek Sivers put it, “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.” If you were sitting with seven other people and six group members picked the wrong answer, but the remaining one chose the correct answer, conformity dropped dramatically. Errors fell from 37 percent to just 5.5 percent. “The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its pressure,” Asch wrote.
Merely knowing that you’re not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. Emotional strength can be found even in small numbers. In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” To feel that you’re not alone, you don’t need a whole crowd to join you. Research by Sigal Barsade and Hakan Ozcelik shows that in business and government organizations, just having one friend is enough to significantly decrease loneliness.
If you want people to go out on a limb, you need to show them that they’re not alone. That was the first key to the success of Otpor! and a number of other revolutions. When Popovic and his friends displayed the fist around Belgrade, they included slogans like “Resistance, because I love Serbia,” “Bite the system,” and “Resistance until victory!” Prior to that,
Serbians who privately opposed Milosevic’s dictatorship feared expressing their disapproval in public. But when they saw the Otpor! fist, they realized that others were willing to step forward. Later, when members of the movement were arrested, police officers asked them who was in charge.
Popovic and his friends trained them to introduce themselves as “one of 20,000 leaders of Otpor!”
Around the world, resistance movements have helped people overcome fear by turning on the go system with small actions that signal the support of a larger group. When Popovic trained the Egyptian activists, he shared a story from 1983 of how Chilean miners had mounted a protest against the country’s dictator, Pinochet. Instead of taking the risk of going on strike, they issued a nationwide call for citizens to demonstrate their resistance by turning their lights on and off. People weren’t afraid to do that, and soon they saw that their neighbors weren’t, either. The miners also invited people to start driving slowly. Taxi drivers slowed down; so did bus drivers. Soon, pedestrians were walking in slow motion down the streets and driving their cars and trucks at a glacial pace. In his inspiring book Blueprint for Revolution, Popovic explains that prior to these activities:
People were afraid to talk openly about despising Pinochet, so if you hated the dictator, you might have imagined that
you were the only one. Tactics like these, Chileans used to
say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” And the beauty was that there was no risk involved: Not even in North Korea was it illegal for cars to drive slowly.
In Poland, when activists objected to government lies dominating the news, they knew that simply turning off their televisions wouldn’t show their fellow citizens that they were ready to stand in protest. Instead, they put their TV sets in wheelbarrows and pushed them around the streets.
Soon, it was happening in towns throughout Poland—and the opposition eventually won power. In Syria, activists poured red food-coloring in fountains around the squares of Damascus, symbolizing that citizens would not accept the bloody rule of their dictator, Assad. Instead of facing the
terror of standing out as lone resisters, people were able to see themselves as members of a group. It’s easier to rebel when it feels like an act of conformity. Other people are involved, so we can join, too.
In Serbia, Otpor! found an ingenious way to activate the go system. The country was in such dire straits that excitement wasn’t an easy emotion to cultivate. Popovic and his friends were able to transform fear into another strong positive emotion: hilarity. Flouting the solemn, resolute demeanor of great moral leaders like Gandhi, Otpor! used humor to attract allies and subvert enemies. They sent birthday presents to Milosevic: a one-way ticket to the Hague to be tried for his war crimes, handcuffs, and a prison uniform. To celebrate the lunar eclipse, they invited downtown shoppers to gaze into a telescope, which showed an eclipse of Milosevic’s face. Later, Otpor! produced a commercial with Milosevic’s image on a T-shirt. “I’ve been trying to clean this stain for ten years,” a woman said, standing next to a washing machine. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything. But now there is a new machine. It has a great program which . . . permanently cleans this and similar stains.” In another case, as a crowd gathered, an Otpor! activist grabbed a microphone and announced:
We are here reporting from in front of the Niš police station. And here is an example of a terrorist, on the border between Serbia and Montenegro. The terrorist is about six feet tall, and he is wearing a T-shirt of the terrorist organization
Otpor! He is wearing eyeglasses, which means he reads a lot. It’s dangerous to read a lot in this country, so beware.
In his workshops, Popovic trains revolutionaries to use humor as a weapon against fear. Not long after he spent some time with the Egyptian activists, an image began to spread around Egypt—a parody of a Microsoft Windows program installation:
It was accompanied by an error message:
As the image gained popularity, fear slowly faded. It’s hard to be afraid of speaking up when you’re laughing at the target of your rebellion.
Effective displays of humor are what Popovic calls dilemma actions: choices that put oppressors in a lose-lose situation. In Syria, activists emblazoned slogans like “Freedom” and “Enough” on thousands of Ping- Pong balls and dumped them onto the streets of Damascus. When they heard the sound of the bouncing balls, Popovic observes, the people of Syria knew “the nonviolent opposition was sticking its finger into the eye of Assad’s regime.” Soon enough the police showed up. “Huffing and puffing, these guys scoured the capital, scooping up Ping-Pong balls one by one.
What the police didn’t seem to realize,” Popovic explains, “was that in this slapstick comedy, the Ping-Pong balls were just the props. It was they themselves, the regime’s enforcers, who had been cast to star as the clowns.”
It’s easy to see how this kind of humor thrives against dictators, who don’t take kindly to jokes. But it can work in ordinary environments, too. Stanford professor Robert Sutton describes a group of young surgeons who regularly endured verbal abuse from attending surgeons. They were treated so poorly that they began to elect an “Attending *sshole of the Week,” who became known as the AAOTW. Every Friday at a happy hour, they would nominate candidates and vote for a winner. They so despised one particular surgeon that they set a rule: in the event of a tie, he would win—even if he wasn’t a finalist that week. They recorded the names of the biggest offenders in a leather-bound journal and wrote a summary of the behaviors that qualified the contestants for the top spot among the losers. The humor made surgeons’ behavior less demoralizing and eventually dampened the young doctors’ fear; they worked up the courage to pass the journal along to the entering chief resident each year. Twenty years later, the journal is still in use by residents at the hospital. The surgeons who created it have themselves climbed to positions of power at hospitals around the country, vowing not to perpetrate or tolerate the kind of treatment to which they had been subjected.
Popovic sees a role for amusement wherever fear runs rampant. Instead of trying to decelerate the stop system, he uses laughter to rev up the go system. When you have no power, it’s a powerful way to convert strong negative emotions into positive ones. In one of his workshops, students were up in arms over the exorbitant price of tuition at their university. After hearing Popovic’s stories, they proposed to approach the university president, show him pictures of their ramen-only diet, and invite themselves to weekly dinners at his house. Popovic smiled and nodded in approval: whether they went ahead with the campaign or not, he had taught them how to fight fear with humor. If the president didn’t welcome them for dinner, Popovic suggested, they ought to at least ask for his leftovers.*
But then he had a more somber message to deliver: The struggle for freedom is not all roses and unicorns. On the surface, Srdja Popovic is the picture of an optimist. When others were living in apathy, he envisioned a better future for Serbia. When others were crippled by fear, he brought laughter, and was hopeful enough to believe that a group of students could defeat a formidable dictator. But when I asked whether his confidence was ever shaken, he immediately said yes. “Did I feel self-doubt? Always, for
ten years.” Even today, having led a successful revolution and trained so many activists to unseat dictators, he thinks about the lives lost in those movements and feels responsible for not having taught them enough.
It’s one thing to motivate people to push a TV in the streets. Giving them the courage to take more meaningful action is a much greater challenge. When I asked Popovic how originals can activate the go system to mobilize a more substantial effort, he replied that we usually do it wrong.
On New Year’s Eve in 2000, Popovic and his friends organized a celebration in Republic Square. They lined up the hottest Serbian rock bands and spread the word that midnight would feature a live concert by the Red Hot Chili Peppers—an international sensation and a huge hit in Serbia. Thousands of people packed the square in Belgrade, dancing to the local bands and buzzing with anticipation about the main event. One minute before midnight, the square went dark and people began counting down.
But when the clock struck twelve, no famous rock band appeared.
The only audible sound was depressing music. As the audience listened in shock, a psychologist named Boris Tadic delivered a clear message from behind the stage. “We have nothing to celebrate,” he said, asking them to go home and think about what action they would take. “This year has been a year of war and oppression. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s make the coming year count. Because 2000 is the year.”
Research by management professors Lynne Andersson and Thomas Bateman sheds light on the impact of that gesture. In a study of hundreds of managers and employees who championed environmental issues at their companies, the successful campaigns didn’t differ from the failures in the amount of emotion they expressed, their use of metaphors or logical arguments, their efforts to consult key stakeholders, or their framing of a green movement as an opportunity or threat. The distinguishing factor was a sense of urgency. To convince leaders to sponsor the issue, create a task force, and spend time and money on it, the environmental champions had to articulate why the original cause needed to be adopted now.
When Harvard professor John Kotter studied more than one hundred companies trying to institute major changes, he found that the first error they made was failing to establish a sense of urgency. Over 50 percent of leaders fell short of convincing their employees that change needed to happen, and it needed to happen now. “Executives underestimate how hard it can be to drive people out of their comfort zones,” Kotter writes. “Without a sense of urgency, people . . . won’t make needed sacrifices.
Instead they cling to the status quo and resist.” Otpor! conveyed urgency with slogans like “It’s time” and “He’s finished.” When they announced, “This is the year,” it was clear to the Serbians that there was a pressing need to act immediately.
To further illuminate the effectiveness of an act like sending everyone home on New Year’s Eve, let’s take a look at a piece of research that transformed one field, spawned another, and ultimately won a Nobel Prize. Imagine that you’re an executive at a car manufacturer, and due to economic challenges, you need to close three plants and lay off six thousand employees. You can choose between two different plans:
Plan A will save one of the three plants and two thousand jobs.
Plan B has a one-third chance of saving all three plants and all six thousand jobs, but a two-thirds chance of saving no plants and no jobs.
Most people prefer Plan A. In the original study, 80 percent chose to play it safe rather than take a chance. But suppose we gave you a different set of options:
Plan A will lose two of the three plants and four thousand jobs.
Plan B has a two-thirds chance of losing all three plants and all six thousand jobs, but a one-third chance of losing no plants and no jobs.
Logically, these are the same options as the first set of choices. But psychologically, they don’t feel the same. In the latter option, 82 percent of people prefer Plan B. Their preferences reverse.
In the first case, the options are framed as gains. We prefer Plan A because we tend to be risk averse in the domain of benefits. When we have a certain gain, we like to hold on to it and protect it. We play it safe to guarantee saving two thousand jobs instead of taking a risk that might leave us saving no jobs. After all, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
But in the second case, we’re presented with a guaranteed loss. Now, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to avoid that loss, even if it means
risking an even bigger one. We’re going to lose thousands of jobs anyway, so we throw caution to the wind and make the big gamble, hoping that we’ll lose nothing.
This line of research was conducted by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it helped give rise to the field of behavioral economics and win Kahneman a Nobel Prize. It revealed that we can dramatically shift risk preferences just by changing a few words to emphasize losses rather than gains. This knowledge has major implications for understanding how to motivate people to take risks.
If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing? According to Peter Salovey, one of the originators of the concept of emotional intelligence and now the president of Yale, it depends on whether they perceive the new behavior as safe or risky. If they think the behavior is safe, we 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 when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we 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 they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.
At the pharmaceutical giant Merck, CEO Kenneth Frazier decided to motivate his executives to take a more active role in leading innovation and change. He asked them to do something radical: generate ideas that would put Merck out of business.
For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.*
This “kill the company” exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain- framed activity in terms of losses. When deliberating about innovation opportunities, the leaders weren’t inclined to take risks. When they considered how their competitors could put them out of business, they
realized that it was a risk not to innovate. The urgency of innovation was apparent.
To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.”
We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.
Psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach find that when we’re experiencing doubts on the way toward achieving a goal, whether we ought to look backward or forward depends on our commitment. When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we’ve already made. As we recognize what we’ve invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge. In the early days of Otpor!, Srdja Popovic and his friends dealt with doubt and fear by helping people laugh and accumulate small wins. That way, they could look back and gain a sense of progress, which turned anxiety into enthusiasm and secured their dedication.
Once commitment is fortified, instead of glancing in the rearview mirror, it’s better to look forward by highlighting the work left to be done. When we’re determined to reach an objective, it’s the gap between where we are and where we aspire to be that lights a fire under us. In Serbia, as the Otpor! movement drew a loyal following that was no longer frozen in fear, it was time to show them how much distance they had yet to travel.
That’s why Popovic and his friends halted the concert and sent the citizens of Belgrade home on New Year’s Eve. In the span of less than two years, Otpor! had accumulated more than 70,000 members in 130 different branches. But to actually overthrow Milosevic, they would need millions of votes. A few years earlier, Milosevic had agreed to a relatively democratic election—and won. His minions controlled the ballot boxes. Even if Serbians could vote him out of office, would he concede? Popovic and his allies understood that they needed intense emotions to propel action across the country. It was time to destabilize the status quo and turn on the go system by reminding them that there was nothing to celebrate because the present was intolerable. “Instead of courage,” management guru Tom Peters recommends fostering “a level of fury with the status quo such that one cannot not act.”
Anger counteracts apathy: We feel that we’ve been wronged, and we’re compelled to fight. But it can also go too far. Anger doesn’t just activate the
go system; it drops a heavy brick on the gas pedal. It’s a force that motivates people to speak up and act, but it can also make them less effective in doing so. After studying activists, Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully suggest that the key is to be “simultaneously hot- and cool- headed. The heat fuels action and change; the coolness shapes the action and change into legitimate and viable forms.” But once the heat is on, how do we keep our cool?
According to Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, if you’re feeling an intense emotion like anxiety or anger, there are two ways to manage it: surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting involves putting on a mask— modifying your speech, gestures, and expressions to present yourself as unfazed. If you’re a flight attendant, and an angry passenger begins yelling at you, you might smile to feign warmth. You’re adjusting your outward appearance, but your internal state is unchanged. You’re furious with the passenger, and the passenger probably knows it. Russian theater director Constantin Stanislavski observed that in surface acting, actors were never fully immersed in the role. They were always aware of the audience, and their performances never came across as authentic. Stanislavski wrote that surface acting “will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it . . . delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique.”
In deep acting, known as method acting in the theater world, you actually become the character you wish to portray. Deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them. If you’re the flight attendant in the above example, you might imagine that the passenger is stressed, afraid of flying, or going through a messy divorce.
You feel empathy for the passenger, and the smile comes naturally to you, creating a more genuine expression of warmth. Deep acting dissolves the distinction between your true self and the role you are playing. You are no longer acting, because you are actually experiencing the genuine feelings of the character.
Before Lewis Pugh embarks on a freezing swim, he engages in deep acting. While listening to songs by Eminem and P. Diddy, he calls up vivid memories of leaping out of an airplane from his days in the British special forces. He is reliving the intense excitement he wants to experience again. The Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis goes a step further. To prepare himself for a role in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, he built a house using
seventeenth-century tools and lived with no running water or electricity. When he played a writer with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot, he spent the entire production process in a wheelchair, speaking in broken dialect and allowing crew members to feed him with a spoon. As an actor, he’s ultimately still playing a character, but the purpose of deep acting is to feel the emotions he wants to display.
Deep acting turns out to be a more sustainable strategy for managing emotions than surface acting. Research shows that surface acting burns us out: Faking emotions that we don’t really feel is both stressful and exhausting. If we want to express a set of emotions, we need to actually experience them.
When Srdja Popovic and his colleagues train activists, they teach deep acting through role-playing exercises. In the Maldives, for example, they had people play the parts of business leaders, hotel owners, island elders, expatriates in India, and police and security guards. This gave them the chance to anticipate how others would react and practice their own responses.
Less than a year after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation. To prepare citizens for the racial conflicts that might ensue on integrated buses, Martin Luther King, Jr., designed and delivered workshops for thousands of black Alabamans, working in concert with nonviolence experts like James Lawson, Bayard Rustin, and Glenn Smiley. The team simulated a bus by setting up rows of chairs, and assigned about a dozen different audience members to play the driver and passengers. The “white passengers” called the black ones names. They spat on them, smashed gum and flicked cigarette ashes in their hair, dumped milk on their heads, and squirted ketchup and mustard in their faces.
In this deep-acting exercise, King wanted to make black citizens angry enough to stand in protest, but not so angry that they would resort to violence. What would be the best way to handle their anger? The most
popular strategy for doing so is venting. Therapists advise us to blow off steam by hitting a pillow or screaming. By expressing our pent-up rage, Freud argued, we can relieve the pressure and find catharsis. In the movie Analyze This, Billy Crystal plays a psychiatrist tasked with helping mobster Robert De Niro manage his anger. Crystal recommends hitting a pillow, and De Niro grabs a gun, aims at a couch, and starts shooting at a pillow.
Crystal, shaken, asks, “Feel better?” “Yeah,” De Niro replies. “I do.”
To test whether venting helps with managing anger, psychologist Brad Bushman designed a shrewd experiment to make people angry. The participants were asked to write an essay about whether they were against abortion or pro-choice. They then received some harsh written feedback from a peer with the opposite view, who rated their essays as disorganized, unoriginal, poorly written, unclear, unpersuasive, and low in quality, adding, “This is one of the worst essays I have read!”
The angry recipients were then randomly assigned to one of three responses: venting, distraction, or control. The members of the venting group were allowed to hit a punching bag as hard as they wanted for as long as they liked, while thinking about the jerk who criticized their essays and looking at his picture. The distraction group hit the punching bag but was instructed to think about becoming physically fit, and was shown a photo of someone exercising. In the control group, there was no punching bag; participants sat quietly for two minutes while the computer was being fixed. Which group would become the most aggressive toward the peer who insulted them?
To find out, Bushman gave each of the groups the chance to blast their essay’s critic with noise, letting them determine the volume and duration of the sonic blasts.
The venting group was the most aggressive. They slammed the critic with more intense noise, and held the button down longer, than the distraction and control groups. One participant got so angry after thinking about the insulting feedback that hitting the punching bag wasn’t enough: he punched a hole in the wall of the lab.
Venting doesn’t extinguish the flame of anger; it feeds it. When we vent our anger, we put a lead foot on the gas pedal of the go system, attacking the target who enraged us. Hitting the punching bag without thinking of the
target, though, keeps the go system on but enables us to consider alternative ways of responding. Sitting quietly begins to activate the stop system.*
In other studies, Bushman has demonstrated that venting doesn’t work even if you think it does—and even if it makes you feel good. The better you feel after venting, the more aggressive you get: not only toward your critic, but also toward innocent bystanders.
Avoiding venting was a central theme in the training of activists in the civil rights movement. Since nonviolent resistance depends on controlling anger, King and his colleagues made a concerted effort in their workshops to stop venting in its tracks. “Sometimes the person playing a white man put so much zeal into his performance that he had to be gently reproved from the sidelines,” King reflected. In response, a citizen playing a black man often “forgot his nonviolent role and struck back with vigor; whenever this happened we worked to rechannel his words and deeds in a nonviolent direction.” After every performance, the group provided feedback and suggestions for responding more constructively.
One of the fundamental problems with venting is that it focuses attention on the perpetrator of injustice. The more you think about the person who wronged you, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation. “Anger is a powerful mobilizing tool,” Srdja Popovic explains, “but if you make people angry, they might start breaking things.” On New Year’s Eve at midnight in 2000, when Otpor! shut down the concert, turned off the lights, and played sad music, only one sight was visible: a gigantic screen, on which a slide show of pictures was being played, none of which featured the despised Milosevic.
The images instead were of Serbian soldiers and police officers who had been killed under Milosevic’s rule.
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. Management researchers Andrew Brodsky, Joshua Margolis, and Joel Brockner find that focusing on the victims of injustice spurs us to speak truth to power. In one experiment, adults witnessed a CEO overpaying himself and underpaying a star employee. When they were prompted to focus on the employee who was treated unfairly, they were 46 percent more likely to challenge the CEO’s payment decision.
In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., frequently called attention to victims of violence and injustice. “We are not out to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he pronounced in a 1956 speech defending the Montgomery bus boycott, but to “free our children from a life of permanent psychological death.” Focusing on the victim activates what psychologists call empathetic anger—the desire to right wrongs done unto another. It turns on the go system, but it makes us thoughtful about how to best respect the victim’s dignity. Research demonstrates that when we’re angry at others, we aim for retaliation or revenge. But when we’re angry for others, we seek out justice and a better system. We don’t just want to punish; we want to help.
When Otpor! displayed the images of dead soldiers, Serbians were pumped with empathetic adrenaline and broke out into a chant: “Let’s make the coming year count.” They weren’t going to get excited about actually taking down their dictator, but they could feel enough righteous indignation that they were determined to do so. In Popovic’s words, “There was an energy in the air that no rock band could ever re-create. Everybody felt that they had something important to do.”
That autumn, Otpor! mobilized one of the largest voter turnouts in Serbia’s history, defeating Milosevic and shepherding in a new era of democracy. Boris Tadic, the psychologist who had sent everyone home because there was nothing to celebrate, was elected president of Serbia four years later.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world,” E. B. White once wrote. “This makes it difficult to plan the day.”
The Declaration of Independence promises Americans the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the quest for happiness, many of us choose to enjoy the world as it is. Originals embrace the uphill battle, striving to make the world what it could be. By struggling to improve life and liberty, they may temporarily give up some pleasure, putting their own happiness on the back burner. In the long run, though,
they have the chance to create a better world. And that—to borrow a turn of phrase from psychologist Brian Little—brings a different kind of satisfaction. Becoming original is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of pursuit.
If you’re seeking to unleash originality, here are some practical actions that you can take. The first steps are for individuals to generate, recognize, voice, and champion new ideas. The next set is for leaders to stimulate novel ideas and build cultures that welcome dissent. The final recommendations are for parents and teachers to help children become comfortable taking a creative or moral stand against the status quo.
To gauge your originality with a free assessment, visit www.adamgrant.net.
creative repertoires by taking up painting, piano, dance, or poetry. Another strategy is to try a job rotation: get trained to do a position that requires a new base of knowledge and skills. A third option is to learn about a different culture, like the fashion designers who became more innovative when they lived in foreign countries that were very different from their own. You don’t need to go abroad to diversify your experience; you can immerse yourself in the culture and customs of a new environment simply by reading about it.
them to list several more reasons not to support it. Assuming that the idea has some merit, when people have to work hard to generate their own objections, they will be more aware of its virtues.
which should be kept, as well as potential inconsistencies between espoused and enacted values.
character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation?
opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?
Writing a book was different the second time around. This time, I didn’t throw away 103,000 words and start over from scratch—yet I was also more acutely aware that someone might actually read what I wrote, which left me second-guessing my taste. Thankfully, my wife, Allison, has an uncanny ability to recognize originality and quality (and also happens to possess the nose of a jungle cat). She instantly knew when a direction was worthwhile and when one stunk somethin’ awful, Sookie. My writing would be significantly less fun without her. She patiently talked with me about every idea, lovingly read the first iteration of each chapter, and deftly reworded and reorganized multiple sections. Her standards are as high as can be, and when she was happy I knew I would be, too. This book would not exist without her passion as a writer and reader and her compassion as a wife and mother.
My agent Richard Pine, a true original, was indispensable in helping to develop the idea for this book and in providing sage advice at every step along the way. It was a treat to work with Rick Kot, who is more than an editor. Along with bringing rare levels of grace to enrich the content and thoughtfulness to refine the structure, he went to bat for this book as if it were his own child.
Sheryl Sandberg read every word with remarkable care and made the book dramatically better by sharpening the logic, style, and practical advice. She contributed more than I could have possibly imagined. Justin Berg endured countless chapter drafts and conversations, and provided just as many creative sparks to improve the substance and the narrative. Reb Rebele read the first full draft, giving his signature blend of deep questions and expert guidance on concepts and writing. Dan Pink racked up multiple assists for suggesting a chapter on timing, reminding me of the narcissism of small differences, and introducing me to one of the most fascinating people profiled.
I was fortunate to work with Alexis Hurley, Eliza Rothstein, and the rest of the InkWell team, and the dedicated group at Viking—particularly Carolyn Coleburn, Kristin Matzen, and Lindsay Prevette for publicity; Jane Cavolina, Diego Nunez, and Jeannette Williams for editing; and Pete Garceau, Jakub Gojda, Roseanne Serra, and Alissa Theodor for the cover and interior design. Jon Cohen and Sarah Cho at SurveyMonkey were swift, effective, and generous in designing and deploying a survey that allowed us to test different subtitles, as well as collect input about the cover design and concept.
The community of colleagues at Wharton—most notably Sigal Barsade, Drew Carton, Samir Nurmohamed, and Nancy Rothbard—has been invaluable. Special thanks to the Impact Lab and Lindsay Miller for their staunch enthusiasm. This project also benefited considerably from the support of Geoff Garrett, Mike Gibbons, Amy Gutmann, Dan Levinthal, and Nicolaj Siggelkow. For insights and introductions to people profiled or quoted in the book, I thank Jennifer Aaker, Teresa Amabile, Niko Canner, Rosanne Cash, Christine Choi, Kate Drane, Lisa Gevelber, David Hornik, Tom Hulme, Jimmy Kaltreider, Daphne Koller, John Michel, Andrew Ng, Bobby Turner, and Lauren Zalaznick.
I appreciate help with finding stories and examples from Josh Berman, Jesse Beyroutey, Wendy De La Rosa, Priti Joshi, Stacey Kalish, Victoria Sakal, and Jenny Wang, and for consistently generative feedback on chapter drafts from James An, Sarah Beckoff, Kelsey Gliva, Nicole Granet, Shlomo Klapper, Nick LoBuglio, Casey Moore, Nicole Pollack, Julianna Pillemer, Sreyas Raghavan, Anna Reighart, Eric Shapiro, Jacob Tupler, Danielle Tussing, and Kimberly Yao. For stimulating conversations about originals, I am grateful to Sue Ashford, Caroline Barlerin, Kipp Bradford, Danielle Celermajer, Annicken Day, Kathryn Dekas, Lisa Donchak, Angela Duckworth, Jane Dutton, Mike Feinberg, Anna Fraser, Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Grossman, Saar Gur, Julie Hanna, Emily Hunt, Karin Klein, Josh Kopelman, Stephanie Landry, Ellen Langer, Ryan Leirvik, Dave Levin, Tamar Lisbona, Brian Little, Nancy Lublin, Joshua Marcuse, Cade Massey, Deb Mills-Scofield, Sean Parker, Meredith Petrin, Phebe Port, Rick Price, Ben Rattray, Fred Rosen, Spencer Scharff, Nell Scovell, Scott Sherman, Phil Tetlock, Colleen Tucker, Jeanine Wright, and Amy Wrzesniewski. (Oh, and Stacy and Kevin Brand for requesting this acknowledgment.)
At one point or another, many family members have modeled or encouraged originality—my parents, Susan and Mark; my sister, Traci; my grandparents, Marion and Jay Grant and the late Florence and Paul Borock; and my in-laws, Adrienne and Neal Sweet.
Our children, Joanna, Elena, and Henry, mean the world to me, and they led me to think differently about this book. They taught me that to become original, adults need to spend less time learning and more time unlearning. And they inspired me to conform less in the hopes of creating a better world for them.
1: Creative Destruction
“The reasonable man adapts himself”: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1903/1963).
They called the company Warby Parker: Personal interviews with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, June 25, 2014, and March 23 and 24, 2015; David Zax, “Fast Talk: How Warby Parker’s Cofounders Disrupted the Eyewear Industry and Stayed Friends,” Fast Company, February 22, 2012, www.fastcompany.com/1818215/fast-talk-how-warby-parkers-cofounders-disrupted- eyewear-industry-and-stayed-friends; “A Chat with the Founders of Warby Parker,” The Standard Culture, September 5, 2012, www.standardculture.com/posts/6884-A-Chat-with-the- Founders-of-Warby-Parker; Blumenthal, “Don’t Underinvest in Branding,” Wall Street Journal, Accelerators, July 18, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2013/07/18/neil-blumenthal- branding-is-a-point-of-view; Curan Mehra and Anya Schultz, “Interview: Dave Gilboa, Founder and CEO of Warby Parker,” Daily Californian, September 5, 2014, www.dailycal.org/2014/09/05/interview-dave-gilboa-founder-ceo-warby-parker/; “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies,” Fast Company, February 9, 2015, www.fastcompany.com/section/most-innovative-companies-2015.
“a person who is different . . . inventive capacity”: Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed on August 24, 2014, at www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/original.
conformity and originality: Harrison Gough, California Psychological Inventory Administrator’s
Guide (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., 1987); see also Thomas S. Bateman and J. Michael Crant, “The Proactive Component of Organizational Behavior: A Measure and Correlates,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 14 (1993): 103–18; Gregory J. Feist and Frank
X. Barron, “Predicting Creativity from Early to Late Adulthood: Intellect, Potential, and Personality,” Journal of Personality 37 (2003): 62–88; Adam M. Grant and Susan J. Ashford, “The Dynamics of Proactivity at Work,” Research in Organizational Behavior 28 (2008): 3–34; Mark A. Griffin, Andrew Neal, and Sharon K. Parker, “A New Model of Work Role Performance: Positive Behavior in Uncertain and Interdependent Contexts,” Academy of Management Journal 50 (2007): 327–47.
vulnerable to “kleptomnesia”: “Kleptomnesia” coined by Dan Gilbert; see C. Neil Macrae, Galen
V. Bodenhausen, and Guglielmo Calvini, “Contexts of Cryptomnesia: May the Source Be with You,” Social Cognition 17 (1999): 273–97.
Internet Explorer is built into : Personal correspondence with Michael Housman, January 30, February 25 and 27, March 9 and 27, and April 6, 2015; Housman presentation at the Wharton People Analytics Conference, March 28, 2015; “How Might Your Choice of Browser Affect Your Job Prospects?” Economist, April 10, 2013, www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/04/economist-explains-how-browser-affects-job-prospects.
Jost’s team developed a theory: John T. Jost, Brett W. Pelham, Oliver Sheldon, and Bilian Ni Sullivan, “Social Inequality and the Reduction of Ideological Dissonance on Behalf of the System: Evidence of Enhanced System Justification Among the Disadvantaged,” European Journal of Social Psychology 33 (2003): 13–36; John T. Jost, Vagelis Chaikalis-Petritsis,
Dominic Abrams, Jim Sidanius, Jojanneke van der Toorn, and Christopher Bratt, “Why Men (and Women) Do and Don’t Rebel: Effects of System Justification on Willingness to Protest,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38 (2012): 197–208; Cheryl J. Wakslak, John T. Jost, Tom R. Tyler, and Emmeline S. Chen, “Moral Outrage Mediates the Dampening Effect of System Justification on Support for Redistributive Social Policies,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 267–74; John T. Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25 (2004): 881–919.
we experience vuja de: Karl E. Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster,” Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (1993): 628–52; see also Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
“man-made and therefore reversible”: Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
Child prodigies: Ellen Winner, “Child Prodigies and Adult Genius: A Weak Link,” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
The least favorite students: Erik L. Westby and V. L. Dawson, “Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom,” Creativity Research Journal 8 (1995): 1–10.
the world’s most excellent sheep: William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).
“only a fraction of gifted children”: Ellen Winner, “Child Prodigies and Adult Genius: A Weak Link,” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley- Blackwell, 2014).
But as cultures rack up: Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Cultures, Nations, and Civilizations: Strategies and Results,” Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration, eds. Paul B. Paulus and Bernard A. Nijstad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
The more you value achievement: Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart, Defying the Crowd: Simple Solutions to the Most Common Relationship Problems (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002); see also John W. Atkinson, “Motivational Determinants of Risk-Taking Behavior,” Psychological Review 64 (1997): 359–72.
lifted up by followers and peers: Jane M. Howell and Boas Shamir, “The Role of Followers in the Charismatic Leadership Process: Relationships and Their Consequences,” Academy of Management Review 30 (2005): 96–112; J. Mark Weber and Celia Moore, “Squires: Key Followers and the Social Facilitation of Charismatic Leadership,” Organizational Psychology Review 4 (2014): 199–227.
From our perspective today, the Declaration: Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010); Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2011).
his dream was: Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998); see also Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Penguin, 1983).
at the pope’s insistence: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (New York: Modern Library Classics, 1568/2006).
astronomy stagnated for decades: Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Vintage, 1997).
“I still intended to be at that company forever”: Livingston, Founders at Work, 42, 45.
act of creative destruction: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1942/2008).
fear of rocking the boat: Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart, James R. Detert, Linda Klebe Treviño, and Amy
“There are so few originals”: Personal interview with Mellody Hobson, May 12, 2015, and Hobson USC commencement speech, May 19, 2015, http://time.com/3889937/mellody-hobson- graduation-speech-usc/.
The word entrepreneur: Richard Cantillon, An Essay on Economic Theory (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1755/2010); see also James Surowiecki, “Epic Fails of the Startup World,”
New Yorker, May 19, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/epic-fails-of-the- startup-world.
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs: Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng, “Should I Quit My Day Job?
A Hybrid Path to Entrepreneurship,” Academy of Management Journal 57 (2014): 936–63.
Phil Knight: Bill Katovsky and Peter Larson, Tread Lightly: Form, Footwear, and the Quest for Injury-Free Running (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012); David C. Thomas, Readings and Cases in International Management: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003).
Steve Wozniak: Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2007).
“We almost didn’t start Google”: Personal conversations with Larry Page on September 15 and 16, 2014, and “Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address,” May 2, 2009, http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2009/05/larry-pages-university-of-michigan.html; Google Investor Relations, https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html.
Ava DuVernay: “With Her MLK Drama Selma, Ava DuVernay Is Directing History,” Slate, December 5, 2014, www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/05/ava_duvernay_profile_the_selma_director_on_her_ mlk_drama_and_being_a_black.html.
“We Will Rock You”: Laura Jackson, Brian May: The Definitive Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).
Grammy winner John Legend: Tiffany McGee, “5 Reasons Why John Legend Is No Ordinary Pop Star,” People, November 6, 2006, www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,20060910,00.html; “Singer/Songwriter John Legend Got Early Start,” USA Today, July 28, 2005, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2005-07-28-legend-early-start_x.htm; John Legend, “All in on Love,” Huffington Post, May 20, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/john- legend/penn-commencement-speech-2014_b_5358334.html.
Stephen King: Lucas Reilly, “How Stephen King’s Wife Saved ‘Carrie’ and Launched His Career,” Mental Floss, October 17, 2013, http://mentalfloss.com/article/53235/how-stephen-kings-wife- saved-carrie-and-launched-his-career.
Dilbert author Scott Adams: Scott Adams, Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2008).
Risk portfolios: Clyde H. Coombs and Lily Huang, “Tests of a Portfolio Theory of Risk Preference,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 85 (1970): 23–29; Clyde H. Coombs and James Bowen, “Additivity of Risk in Portfolios,” Perception & Psychophysics 10 (1971): 43–46, and “Test of the Between Property of Expected Utility,” Journal of Mathematical Psychology 13 (323–37).
Baseball owner Branch Rickey: Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
T. S. Eliot’s landmark work: Paul Collins, “Ezra Pound’s Kickstarter Plan for T. S. Eliot,” Mental Floss, December 8, 2013, http://mentalfloss.com/article/54098/ezra-pounds-kickstarter-plan-ts- eliot.
Polaroid founder Edwin Land: Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Pierre Omidyar: Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
“take the risk out of risk-taking”: Jane Bianchi, “The Power of Zigging: Why Everyone Needs to Channel Their Inner Entrepreneur,” LearnVest, October 22, 2014, http://www.learnvest.com/2014/10/crazy-is-a-compliment-the-power-of-zigging-when- everyone-else-zags/; Marco della Cava, “Linda Rottenberg’s Tips for ‘Crazy’ Entrepreneurs,” USA Today, October 15, 2014, www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/02/linda-rottenberg- crazy-is-a-compliment-book/16551377; “Myths About Entrepreneurship,” Harvard Business Review, IdeaCast, October 2010, https://hbr.org/2014/10/myths-about-entrepreneurship; Linda Rottenberg, Crazy Is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags (New York: Portfolio, 2014).
Sara Blakely: Clare O’Connor, “Top Five Startup Tips from Spanx Billionaire Sara Blakely,” Forbes, April 2, 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/04/02/top-five-startup-tips- from-spanx-billionaire-sara-blakely/.
Henry Ford: “Henry Ford Leaves Edison to Start Automobile Company,” History.com, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/henry-ford-leaves-edison-to-start-automobile-company.
“Bill Gates might more accurately”: Rick Smith, The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great (New York: Penguin, 2009).
having co-CEOs: Matteo P. Arena, Stephen P. Ferris, and Emre Unlu, “It Takes Two: The Incidence and Effectiveness of Co-CEOs,” The Financial Review 46 (2011): 385–412; see also Ryan Krause, Richard Priem, and Leonard Love, “Who’s in Charge Here? Co-CEOs, Power Gaps, and Firm Performance,” Strategic Management Journal (2015)
“entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse”: Hongwei Xu and Martin Ruef, “The Myth of the Risk-Tolerant Entrepreneur,” Strategic Organization 2 (2004): 331–55.
successful entrepreneurs . . . stealing valuables: Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein, “Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Does It Pay?,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 19276 (August 2013); Zhen Zhang and Richard D. Arvey, “Rule Breaking in Adolescence and Entrepreneurial Status: An Empirical Investigation,” Journal of Business Venturing 24 (2009): 436–47; Martin Obschonka, Hakan Andersson, Rainer K.
Silbereisen, and Magnus Sverke, “Rule-Breaking, Crime, and Entrepreneurship: A Replication and Extension Study with 37-Year Longitudinal Data,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 83 (2013): 386–96; Marco Caliendo, Frank Fossen, and Alexander Kritikos, “The Impact of Risk Attitudes on Entrepreneurial Survival,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 76 (2010): 45–63.
“Many entrepreneurs take”: Malcolm Gladwell, “The Sure Thing,” New Yorker, January 18, 2010, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/18/the-sure-thing.
In a comprehensive analysis: Hao Zhao, Scott E. Seibert, and G. T. Lumpkin, “The Relationship of Personality to Entrepreneurial Intentions and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Management 36 (2010): 381–404; Scott Shane, The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
When hundreds of historians: Ronald J. Deluga, “American Presidential Proactivity, Charismatic Leadership, and Rated Performance,” Leadership Quarterly 9 (1998): 265–91; Steven J. Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer, Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2004).
Before signing the Emancipation Proclamation: Todd Brewster, Lincoln’s Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 60.
To unlock their mindsets: Amy Wrzesniewski, Justin M. Berg, Adam M. Grant, Jennifer Kurkoski, and Brian Welle, “Dual Mindsets at Work: Achieving Long-Term Gains in Happiness,” under revision, Academy of Management Journal (2015).
2: Blind Inventors and One-Eyed Investors
“Creativity is allowing yourself”: Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (New York: HarperBusiness, 1996).
“Segway as an investment”: PandoMonthly, “John Doerr on What Went Wrong with Segway,” accessed on February 12, 2015, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQzjpBkUTY.
Why did such savvy: Personal interviews with Aileen Lee, February 6, 2015, Randy Komisar, February 13, 2015, and Bill Sahlman, March 11, 2015; Steve Kemper, Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Hayagreeva Rao, Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Mathew Hayward, Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris Is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap (New York: Kaplan Business, 2007); Jordan Golson, “Well, That Didn’t Work: The Segway Is a Technological Marvel. Too Bad It Doesn’t Make Any Sense,” Wired, January 16, 2015, www.wired.com/2015/01/well- didnt-work-segway-technological-marvel-bad-doesnt-make-sense; Paul Graham, “The Trouble
with the Segway,” July 2009, www.paulgraham.com/segway.html; Mike Masnick, “Why Segway Failed to Reshape the World: Focused on Invention, Rather Than Innovation,” Techdirt, July 31, 2009, www.techdirt.com/articles/20090730/1958335722.shtml; Gary Rivlin, “Segway’s Breakdown,” Wired, March 2003, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/segway.html; Douglas A. McIntyre, “The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade,” Time, May 14, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898610_1898625_1898641,00. html.
Some years earlier, two entertainers: Personal interviews with Rick Ludwin, February 24 and April 4, 2015; Phil Rosenthal, “NBC Executive Stands Apart by Taking Stands,” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2005, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-08- 21/business/0508210218_1_warren-littlefield-rick-ludwin-head-of-nbc-entertainment; Brian Lowry, “From Allen to Fallon, Exec Has Worked with All 6 ‘Tonight Show’ Hosts,” Variety, February 17, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/from-allen-to-fallon-exec-has-worked-with- all-the-tonight-show-hosts-1201109027; Warren Littlefield, Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV (New York: Doubleday, 2012); Stephen Battaglio, “The Biz: The Research Memo That Almost Killed Seinfeld,” TV Guide, June 27, 2014,
www.tvguide.com/news/seinfeld-research-memo-1083639; Jordan Ecarma, “5 Hit TV Shows That Almost Didn’t Happen,” Arts.Mic, April 26, 2013, http://mic.com/articles/38017/5-hit-tv- shows-that-almost-didn-t-happen; “From the Archives: Seinfeld on 60 Minutes,” CBS News, March 1, 2015, www.cbsnews.com/news/jerry-seinfeld-on-60-minutes; Louisa Mellor, “Seinfeld’s Journey from Flop to Acclaimed Hit,” Den of Geek, November 10, 2014, www.denofgeek.us/tv/seinfeld/241125/seinfeld-s-journey-from-flop-to-acclaimed-hit; David Kronke, “There’s Nothing to It,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1995, http://articles.latimes.com/1995-01-29/entertainment/ca-25549_1_jerry-seinfeld; James Sterngold, “Seinfeld Producers Wonder, Now What?” New York Times, January 27, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/01/27/movies/seinfeld-producers-wonder-now-what.html.
87 percent were completely unique: Laura J. Kornish and Karl T. Ulrich, “Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas,” Management Science 57 (2011): 107–128.
creative forecasting: Justin M. Berg, “Balancing on the Creative High-Wire: Forecasting the Success of Novel Ideas in Organizations,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2015.
High school seniors: For a review, see David Dunning, Chip Heath, and Jerry M. Suls, “Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5 (2004): 69–106.
Entrepreneurs: When 3,000: Arnold C. Cooper, Carolyn Y. Woo, and William C. Dunkelberg, “Entrepreneurs’ Perceived Chances for Success,” Journal of Business Venturing 3 (1988): 97– 108; Noam Wasserman, “How an Entrepreneur’s Passion Can Destroy a Startup,” Wall Street
Journal, August 25, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/how-an-entrepreneur-s-passion-can-destroy-a- startup-1408912044.
even geniuses have trouble: Dean Keith Simonton, “Creativity as Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Is the Creative Process Darwinian?,” Psychological Inquiry 10 (1999): 309–28.
“Beethoven’s own favorites”: Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Productivity, Age, and Stress: A Biographical Time-Series Analysis of 10 Classical Composers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977): 791–804.
Kozbelt pored over letters: Aaron Kozbelt, “A Quantitative Analysis of Beethoven as Self-Critic: Implications for Psychological Theories of Musical Creativity,” Psychology of Music 35 (2007): 144–68.
“proved to constitute ‘blind alleys’”: Dean Keith Simonton, “Creativity and Discovery as Blind Variation: Campbell’s (1960) BVSR Model After the Half-Century Mark,” Review of General Psychology 15 (2011): 158–74.
“The odds of producing an influential”: Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Productivity: A Predictive and Explanatory Model of Career Trajectories and Landmarks,” Psychological Review 104 (1997): 66–89.
London Philharmonic Orchestra: London Philharmonic Orchestra and David Parry, The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music, X5 Music Group, November 23, 2009.
In a study of over 15,000: Aaron Kozbelt, “Longitudinal Hit Ratios of Classical Composers: Reconciling ‘Darwinian’ and Expertise Acquisition Perspectives on Lifespan Creativity,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 2 (2008): 221–35.
“the most important possible thing”: Ira Glass, “The Gap,” accessed on April 14, 2015, at https://vimeo.com/85040589.
“Those periods in which”: Dean Keith Simonton, “Thomas Edison’s Creative Career: The Multilayered Trajectory of Trials, Errors, Failures, and Triumphs,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 9 (2015): 2–14.
“especially novel ideas”: Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
to achieve originality: Teresa M. Amabile, “How to Kill Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September–October (1998): 77–87; Teresa M. Amabile, Sigal G. Barsade, Jennifer S. Mueller, and Barry M. Staw, “Affect and Creativity at Work,” Administrative Science Quarterly 50 (2005): 367–403.
Upworthy: Upworthy, “How to Make That One Thing Go Viral,” December 3, 2012, www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/how-to-make-that-one-thing-go-viral-just-kidding, and “2 Monkeys Were Paid Unequally; See What Happens Next,” November 11, 2013, www.upworthy.com/2-monkeys-were-paid-unequally-see-what-happens-next.
creative careers were closed to women: Dean Keith Simonton, “Leaders of American Psychology, 1879–1967: Career Development, Creative Output, and Professional Achievement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 5–17.
first ideas are often the most conventional: Brian J. Lucas and Loran F. Nordgren, “People Underestimate the Value of Persistence for Creative Performance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109 (2015): 232–43.
Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead: Personal interview with Lizz Winstead, February 8, 2015.
minimum viable product: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown, 2011).
false negatives are common: Charalampos Mainemelis, “Stealing Fire: Creative Deviance in the Evolution of New Ideas,” Academy of Management Review 35 (2010): 558–78; Aren Wilborn, “5 Hilarious Reasons Publishers Rejected Classic Best-Sellers,” Cracked, February 13, 2013, www.cracked.com/article_20285_5-hilarious-reasons-publishers-rejected-classic-best- sellers.html; Berg, “Balancing on the Creative High-Wire.”
first instinct is often to reject novelty: Jennifer S. Mueller, Shimul Melwani, and Jack A. Goncalo, “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 13–17.
the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become: Erik Dane, “Reconsidering the Trade-Off Between Expertise and Flexibility: A Cognitive Entrenchment Perspective,” Academy of Management Review 35 (2010): 579–603.
“If you’re gonna make connections”: Drake Baer, “In 1982, Steve Jobs Presented an Amazingly Accurate Theory About Where Creativity Comes From,” Business Insider, February 20, 2015, www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-theory-of-creativity-2015-2.
engagement in the arts among Nobel Prize winners: Robert Root-Bernstein, Lindsay Allen, Leighanna Beach, Ragini Bhadula, Justin Fast, Chelsea Hosey, Benjamin Kremkow, Jacqueline Lapp, Kaitlin Lonc, Kendell Pawelec, Abigail Podufaly, Caitlin Russ, Laurie Tennant, Eric Vrtis, and Stacey Weinlander, “Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members,” Journal of Psychology of Science and
Technology 1 (2008): 51–63.
A representative study of thousands: Laura Niemi and Sara Cordes, “The Arts and Economic Vitality: Leisure Time Interest in Art Predicts Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Work,” manuscript under review for publication, 2015.
only Galileo “was able”: Dean Keith Simonton, “Foresight, Insight, Oversight, and Hindsight in Scientific Discovery: How Sighted Were Galileo’s Telescopic Sightings?,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6 (2012): 243–54.
Research on highly creative adults: Donald W. MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–95, and “Personality and the Realization of Creative Potential,” American Psychologist 20 (1965): 273–81.
time spent abroad: Frédéric C. Godart, William W. Maddux, Andrew V. Shipilov, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Fashion with a Foreign Flair: Professional Experiences Abroad Facilitate the Creative Innovations of Organizations,” Academy of Management Journal 58 (2015): 195–220.
“chill or wave of excitement”: Robert R. McCrae, “Aesthetic Chills as a Universal Marker of Openness to Experience,” Motivation and Emotion 31 (2007): 5–11; Laura A. Maruskin, Todd
M. Thrash, and Andrew J. Elliot, “The Chills as a Psychological Construct: Content Universe, Factor Structure, Affective Composition, Elicitors, Trait Antecedents, and Consequences,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103 (2012): 135–57; Paul J. Silvia and Emily C. Nusbaum, “On Personality and Piloerection: Individual Differences in Aesthetic Chills and Other Unusual Aesthetic Experiences,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5 (2011): 208–14;. Nusbaum and Silvia, “Shivers and Timbres: Personality and the Experience of Chills from Music,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2 (2011): 199–204; Oliver Grewe, Reinhard Kopiez, and Eckart Altenmüller, “The Chill Parameter: Goose Bumps and Shivers as Promising Measures in Emotion Research,” Music Perception 27 (2009): 61–74; Brian S. Connelly, Deniz S. Ones, Stacy E. Davies, and Adib Birkland, “Opening Up Openness: A Theoretical Sort Following Critical Incidents Methodology and a Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Trait Family Measures,” Journal of Personality Assessment 96 (2014): 17–28.
“I acquired a strong taste”: Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (London: John Murray, 1908).
Jobs “thought the machine”: Steve Kemper, Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).
Do diverse experiences: Angela Ka-yee Leung, William W. Maddux, Adam D. Galinsky, and Chi- yue Chiu, “Multicultural Experience Enhances Creativity: The When and How,” American Psychologist 63 (2008): 169–81; William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky, “Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 1047–61.
our intuitions are only accurate: Erik Dane, Kevin W. Rockmann, and Michael G. Pratt, “When Should I Trust My Gut? Linking Domain Expertise to Intuitive Decision-Making Effectiveness,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 119 (2012): 187–94.
intuitions are only trustworthy: Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree,” American Psychologist 64 (2009): 515–26.
The more successful people have been: Pino G. Audia, Edwin A. Locke, and Ken G. Smith, “The Paradox of Success: An Archival and a Laboratory Study of Strategic Persistence Following Radical Environmental Change,” Academy of Management Journal 43 (2000): 837–53.
five dozen angel investors: Cheryl Mitteness, Richard Sudek, and Melissa S. Cardon, “Angel Investor Characteristics That Determine Whether Perceived Passion Leads to Higher Evaluations of Funding Potential,” Journal of Business Venturing 27 (2012): 592606.
intuition operates rapidly: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Macmillan, 2011).
“Passionate people”: Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: Grand Central, 2014).
The four founders weren’t hindered: Personal interviews with Lon Binder, December 30, 2014, and Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, February 2, 2015.
As an inventor: Adam Higginbotham, “Dean Kamen’s Mission to Bring Unlimited Clean Water to the Developing World,” Wired, August 13, 2013, www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/08/features/engine-of-progress; Christopher Helman, “Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks His New Stirling Engine Will Get You off the Grid for Under $10K,” Forbes, July 2, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/07/02/dean- kamen-thinks-his-new-stirling-engine-could-power-the-world; Erico Guizzo, “Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Receives FDA Approval,” IEEE Spectrum, May 13, 2014, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamen-luke-arm-prosthesis- receives-fda-approval.
3: Out on a Limb
Out on a Limb: Susan J. Ashford, Nancy P. Rothbard, Sandy Kristin Piderit, and Jane E. Dutton, “Out on a Limb: The Role of Context and Impression Management in Selling Gender-Equity Issues,” Administrative Science Quarterly 43 (1998): 23–57.
“Great spirits have”: The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, ed. Alice Calaprice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
an online system for: Personal interviews with Carmen Medina, August 14, 2014, and March 2, 2015; personal interview with Susan Benjamin, April 3, 2015; Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina, Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within (New York: O’Reilly Media, 2014).
a platform called Intellipedia: “Don Burke and Sean P. Dennehy,” Service to America Medals, 2009, http://servicetoamericamedals.org/honorees/view_profile.php?profile=215; “CIA Adopting Web 2.0 Tools Despite Resistance,” Space War, June 12, 2009, www.spacewar.com/reports/CIA_adopting_Web_2.0_tools_despite_resistance_999.html; Steve Vogel, “For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect the Dots,” Washington Post, August 27, 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/08/26/AR2009082603606.html; Robert K. Ackerman, “Intellipedia
Seeks Ultimate Information Sharing,” SIGNAL, October 2007, www.afcea.org/content/? q=intellipedia-seeks-ultimate-information-sharing.
initiative that gets penalized: Scott E. Seibert, Maria L. Kraimer, and J. Michael Crant, “What Do Proactive People Do? A Longitudinal Model Linking Proactive Personality and Career Success,” Personnel Psychology 54 (2001): 845–74.
as self-righteous: Benoît Monin, Pamela J. Sawyer, and Matthew J. Marquez, “The Rejection of Moral Rebels: Resenting Those Who Do the Right Thing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95 (2008): 76–93.
power without status: Alison R. Fragale, Jennifer R. Overbeck, and Margaret A. Neale, “Resources Versus Respect: Social Judgments Based on Targets’ Power and Status Positions,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011): 767–75.
using their power in ways that degraded others: Nathanael J. Fast, Nir Halevy, and Adam D. Galinsky, “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012): 391–94.
Francis Ford Coppola: Jon Lewis, “If History Has Taught Us Anything . . . Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount Studios, and The Godfather Parts I, II, and III,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather Trilogy, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
called idiosyncrasy credits: Edwin P. Hollander, “Conformity, Status, and Idiosyncrasy Credit,” Psychological Review 65 (1958): 117–27; see also Hannah Riley Bowles and Michele Gelfand, “Status and the Evaluation of Workplace Deviance,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 49–54.
more status and competence when they donned a T-shirt and a beard: Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan, “The Red Sneakers Effect: Inferring Status and Competence from Signals of Nonconformity,” Journal of Consumer Research 41 (2014): 35–54.
powerless communication: Alison R. Fragale, “The Power of Powerless Speech: The Effects of Speech Style and Task Interdependence on Status Conferral,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 101 (2006): 243–61; Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (New York: Viking Press, 2013).
when we’re aware: Marian Friestad and Peter Wright, “The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts,” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (1994): 1–31.
“Every time I would”: Personal interviews with Rufus Griscom, January 29 and February 26, 2015.
gauge the intelligence: Teresa M. Amabile, “Brilliant But Cruel: Perceptions of Negative Evaluators,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1983): 146–56.
when experts express doubt: Uma R. Karmarkar and Zakary L. Tormala, “Believe Me, I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About: The Effects of Source Certainty on Consumer Involvement and Persuasion,” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (2010): 1033–49.
it makes you more trustworthy: See R. Glen Hass and Darwyn Linder, “Counterargument Availability and the Effects of Message Structure on Persuasion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23 (1972): 219–33.
We use ease of retrieval: Norbert Schwarz, Herbert Bless, Fritz Strack, Gisela Klumpp, Helga Rittenauer-Schatka, and Annette Simons, “Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 195–202.
they actually liked him more: Geoffrey Haddock, “It’s Easy to Like or Dislike Tony Blair: Accessibility Experiences and the Favourability of Attitude Judgments,” British Journal of Psychology 93 (2002): 257–67.
tap out the rhythm of a song: Elizabeth L. Newton, “Overconfidence in the Communication of Intent: Heard and Unheard Melodies,” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University (1990); Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007).
John Kotter studied change agents: John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
The mere exposure effect: Robert B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monographs 9 (1968): 1–27.
the more familiar a face: Robert F. Bornstein, “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968–1987,” Psychological Bulletin 106 (1989): 265–89; Robert B. Zajonc, “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 10 (2001): 224–28; Eddie Harmon-Jones and John J. B. Allen, “The Role of Affect in the Mere Exposure Effect: Evidence from Psychophysiological and Individual Differences Approaches,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27 (2001): 889–98.
when people looked at photographs: Theodore H. Mita, Marshall Dermer, and Jeffrey Knight, “Reversed Facial Images and the Mere-Exposure Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977): 597–601.
“Familiarity doesn’t breed”: Personal interview with Howard Tullman, December 16, 2014.
there are four different options: Ethan R. Burris, James R. Detert, and Dan S. Chiaburu, “Quitting Before Leaving: The Mediating Effects of Psychological Attachment and Detachment on Voice,” Journal of Applied Psychology 93 (2008): 912–22.
exit, voice, persistence, and neglect: Caryl E. Rusbult, Dan Farrell, Glen Rogers, and Arch G. Mainous III, “Impact of Exchange Variables on Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect: An Integrative Model of Responses to Declining Job Satisfaction,” Academy of Management
Journal 31 (1988): 599–627; Michael J. Withey and William H. Cooper, “Predicting Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect,” Administrative Science Quarterly 34 (1989): 521–39.
these choices are based on feelings of control and commitment: Subrahmaniam Tangirala and Rangaraj Ramanujam, “Exploring Nonlinearity in Employee Voice: The Effects of Personal Control and Organizational Identification,” Academy of Management Journal 51 (2008): 1189– 1203.
a supportive boss: Fred O. Walumbwa and John Schaubroeck, “Leader Personality Traits and Employee Voice Behavior: Mediating Roles of Ethical Leadership and Work Group Psychological Safety,” Journal of Applied Psychology 94 (2009): 1275–86.
“agreeable people value cooperation”: Jeffrey A. LePine and Linn Van Dyne, “Voice and Cooperative Behavior as Contrasting Forms of Contextual Performance: Evidence of Differential Relationships with Big Five Personality Characteristics and Cognitive Ability,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86 (2001): 326–36.
typically the last people we seek: Tiziana Cascario and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks,” Harvard Business Review June (2005): 92–99.
bad user interface: Robert Sutton, “Porcupines with Hearts of Gold,” BusinessWeek, July 14, 2008, www.businessweek.com/business_at_work/bad_bosses/archives/2008/07/porcupines_with.html.
Agreeable people were happiest: Stéphane Côté and Debbie S. Moskowitz, “On the Dynamic Covariation between Interpersonal Behavior and Affect: Prediction from Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 1032–46.
when managers have a track record of challenging the status quo: Zhen Zhang, Mo Wang, and Junqi Shi, “Leader-Follower Congruence in Proactive Personality and Work Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Leader-Member Exchange,” Academy of Management Journal 55 (2012): 111–30; see also Nathanael J. Fast, Ethan R. Burris, and Caroline A. Bartel, “Managing to Stay in the Dark: Managerial Self-Efficacy, Ego Defensiveness, and the Aversion to Employee Voice,” Academy of Management Journal 57 (2014): 1013–34; Mark J. Somers and Jose C. Casal, “Organizational Commitment and Whistle-Blowing: A Test of the Reformer and the Organization Man Hypotheses,” Group & Organization Management 19 (1994): 270–84.
middle-status conformity effect: George C. Homans, The Human Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950) and Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961).
sacrificing anything professionally: Personal conversations with Larry Page on September 15 and 16, 2014.
security analysts: Damon J. Phillips and Ezra W. Zuckerman, “Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001): 379–429.
the middle of the status hierarchy actually makes us less original: Michelle M. Duguid and Jack
A. Goncalo, “Squeezed in the Middle: The Middle Status Trade Creativity for Focus,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109, no. 4 (2015), 589–603.
strong gender-role stereotypes: Anne M. Koenig, Alice H. Eagly, Abigail A. Mitchell, and Tiina Ristikari, “Are Leader Stereotypes Masculine? A Meta-Analysis of Three Research Paradigms,” Psychological Bulletin 127 (2011): 616–42.
“labeled bossy”: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013).
voicing new revenue-generating ideas: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, “Speaking While Female,” New York Times, January 12, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/speaking-while-female.html; Adam M. Grant, “Rocking the Boat But Keeping It Steady: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Employee Voice,” Academy of Management Journal 56 (2013): 1703–23.
male executives who talk more: Victoria L. Brescoll, “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 56 (2011): 622–41.
when women offer suggestions: Ethan R. Burris, “The Risks and Rewards of Speaking Up: Managerial Responses to Employee Voice,” Academy of Management Journal 55 (2012): 851– 75.
in male-dominated organizations, women pay a price: Taeya M. Howell, David A. Harrison, Ethan R. Burris, and James R. Detert, “Who Gets Credit for Input? Demographic and Structural Status Cues in Voice Recognition,” Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming (2015).
Sexual harassment, she concludes: Jennifer L. Berdahl, “The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women,” Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (2007): 425–37.
they’re being communal: Jens Mazei, Joachim Hüffmeier, Philipp Alexander Freund, Alice F. Stuhlmacher, Lena Bilke, and Guido Hertel, “A Meta-Analysis on Gender Differences in Negotiation Outcomes and Their Moderators,” Psychological Bulletin 141 (2015): 85–104; Emily T. Amanatullah and Michael W. Morris, “Negotiating Gender Roles: Gender Differences in Assertive Negotiating Are Mediated by Women’s Fear of Backlash and Attenuated When Negotiating on Behalf of Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98 (2010): 256–67; Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Kathleen L. McGinn, “Constraints and
Triggers: Situational Mechanics of Gender in Negotiation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (2005): 951–65.
double minority group members: Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, “Failure Is Not an Option for Black Women: Effects of Organizational Performance on Leaders with Single Versus Dual- Subordinate Identities,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012): 1162–67.
black women defy categories: Robert W. Livingston, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, and Ella F. Washington, “Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 354–58.
“Apple being successful depended on”: Personal interview with Donna Dubinsky, June 20, 2014; Todd D. Jick and Mary Gentile, “Donna Dubinsky and Apple Computer, Inc. (A),” Harvard Business School, Case 9-486-083, December 11, 1995.
Jobs promoted every one of them: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
“Voice feeds” : Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
the mistakes we regret: Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec, “The Temporal Pattern to the Experience of Regret,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 357–65, and “The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why,” Psychological Review 102 (1995): 379–95.
4: Fools Rush In
“Never put off till tomorrow”: Quote Investigator, January 17, 2013, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/17/put-off.
“He worked on it all night”: Clarence B. Jones, Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993); Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Carmine Gallo, “How Martin Luther King Improvised ‘I Have a Dream,’” Forbes, August 27, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2013/08/27/public-speaking-how-mlk- improvised-second-half-of-dream-speech; Frank Hagler, “50 Incredible Facts—and Photos— from the March on Washington,” Policy.Mic, August 28, 2013, mic.com/articles/60815/50- incredible-facts-and-photos-from-the-march-on-washington; David J. Garrow, Bearing the
Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986).
it takes longer to write: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter,” Quote Investigator, April 28, 2012, quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter.
procrastination might be conducive to originality: Jihae Shin, “Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Hidden Benefits of Procrastination for Creativity,” manuscript under review, 2015.
“cannot produce a work of genius according to a schedule”: William A. Pannapacker, “How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci,” Chronicle Review, February 20, 2009.
“accomplish most when they work the least”: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (New York: Modern Library Classics, 1568/2006).
moments where we’re unfocused: Mareike B. Wieth and Rose T. Zacks, “Time of Day Effects on Problem Solving: When the Non-Optimal Is Optimal,” Thinking & Reasoning 17 (2011): 387– 401.
The science stars: Rena Subotnik, Cynthia Steiner, and Basanti Chakraborty, “Procrastination Revisited: The Constructive Use of Delayed Response,” Creativity Research Journal 12 (1999): 151–60.
“a form of incubation”: Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod, “Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin 135 (2009): 94–120.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: Peggy Noonan, “The Writing of a Great Address,” Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2013, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324399404578583991319014114; Ronald C. White, Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (New York: Random House, 2011).
the Zeigarnik effect: Bluma Zeigarnik, “Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen,” Psychologische Forschung 9 (1927): 1–85; see Kenneth Savitsky, Victoria Husted Medvec, and Thomas Gilovich, “Remembering and Regretting: The Zeigarnik Effect and the Cognitive Availability of Regrettable Actions and Inactions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (1997): 248–57.
“I love deadlines,” Douglas Adams said: M. J. Simpson, Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams (Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2005).
the most creative architects: Donald W. MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–95, and “Personality and the Realization of Creative Potential,” American Psychologist 20 (1965): 273–81.
a study of pizza chains: Adam M. Grant, Francesca Gino, and David A. Hofmann, “Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Employee Proactivity,” Academy of Management Journal 54 (2011): 528–50.
companies in India: Sucheta Nadkarni and Pol Herrmann, “CEO Personality, Strategic Flexibility, and Firm Performance: The Case of the Indian Business Process Outsourcing Industry,” Academy of Management Journal 53 (2010): 1050–73.
evaluated their strategies at the midpoint: Anita Williams Woolley, “Effects of Intervention Content and Timing on Group Task Performance,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 34 (1998): 30–46.
the midpoint of a task: Connie J. G. Gersick, “Marking Time: Predictable Transitions in Task Groups,” Academy of Management Journal 32 (1989): 274–309, and “Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm,” Academy of Management Review 16 (1991): 10–36.
halftimes can be so influential: Nancy Katz, “Sports Teams as a Model for Workplace Teams: Lessons and Liabilities,” Academy of Management Executive 15 (2001): 56–67.
“The number one thing”: Bill Gross, “The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed,” TED Talks, June 2015, www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed/transcript.
a first-mover advantage: Lisa E. Bolton, “Believing in First Mover Advantage,” manuscript under review.
These edges create barriers: Marvin B. Lieberman and David B. Montgomery, “First-Mover Advantages,” Strategic Management Journal 9 (1988): 41–58; Montgomery and Lieberman, “First-Mover (Dis)advantages: Retrospective and Link with the Resource-Based View,” Strategic Management Journal 19 (1998): 1111–25.
the downsides of being the first mover: Peter N. Golder and Gerard J. Tellis, “Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend?” Journal of Marketing Research 30 (1993): 158–70.
When originals rush: Jeanette Brown, “What Led to Kozmo’s Final Delivery,” Bloomberg Business, April 15, 2001, www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2001-04-15/what-led-to-kozmos-final- delivery; Greg Bensinger, “In Kozmo.com’s Failure, Lessons for Same-Day Delivery,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/03/in-kozmo-coms- failure-lessons-for-same-day-deliver; Diane Seo, “The Big Kozmo KO,” Salon, July 21, 2000, www.salon.com/2000/07/21/kozmo; Stephanie Miles, “Strategy, Inefficiencies Hurt Kozmo, Say Its Competitors in New York,” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2011, www.wsj.com/articles/SB987187139726234932; Jeremy Stahl, “The Kozmo Trap,” Slate, May 14, 2012, http://hive.slate.com/hive/10-rules-starting-small-business/article/the-kozmo-trap; Jayson Blair, “Behind Kozmo’s Demise: Thin Profit Margins,” New York Times, April 13, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/behind-kozmo-s-demise-thin-profit-margins.html.
fail because of premature scaling: Boonsri Dickinson, “Infographic: Most Startups Fail Because of Premature Scaling,” ZDNet, September 1, 2011, www.zdnet.com/article/infographic-most-
startups-fail-because-of-premature-scaling.
“Wouldn’t you rather be second”: Toronto Public Library, “Malcolm Gladwell, Part 3,” May 28, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyL9H4wJ0VE; Laura Petrecca, “Malcolm Gladwell Advocates Being Late,” USA Today, June 20, 2011, content.usatoday.com/communities/livefrom/post/2011/06/malcolm-gladwell-talks-innovation- and-being-late-at-cannes/1#.VVc6ykZ2M5w.
study of software startups: Elizabeth G. Pontikes and William P. Barnett, “When to Be a Nonconformist Entrepreneur? Organizational Responses to Vital Events,” University of Chicago Working Paper No. 12-59 (2014).
Moving too fast: Steve Kemper, Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
“If it didn’t look dorky”: Personal interview with Bill Sahlman, March 11, 2015.
pioneers had lower survival rates: Stanislav D. Dobrev and Aleksios Gotsopoulos, “Legitimacy Vacuum, Structural Imprinting, and the First Mover Disadvantage,” Academy of Management Journal 53 (2010): 1153–74.
“We had to wait for Amazon”: Personal interview with Neil Blumenthal, June 25, 2014.
Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (New York: William Morrow, 2009).
“A new scientific truth”: Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).
First-mover advantages: Marvin B. Lieberman, “Did First-Mover Advantages Survive the Dot-Com Crash?,” Anderson School of Management working paper (2007).
odds of success aren’t higher: Pieter A. VanderWerf and John F. Mahon, “Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Research Methods on Findings of First Mover Advantage,” Management Science 43 (1997): 1510–19.
when the market is uncertain: William Boulding and Markus Christen, “Sustainable Pioneering Advantage? Profit Implications of Market Entry Order,” Marketing Science 22 (2003): 371–92.
“People under 35”: Jessica Stillman, “Older Entrepreneurs Get a Bum Rap,” Inc., December 3, 2012, www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/older-entrepreneurs-vs-young-founders.html.
“A person who has not made”: David Wessel, “The ‘Eureka’ Moments Happen Later,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2012, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443589304577633243828684650.
“To punish me”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
When companies run suggestion boxes: Birgit Verworn, “Does Age Have an Impact on Having Ideas? An Analysis of the Quantity and Quality of Ideas Submitted to a Suggestion System,” Creativity and Innovation Management 18 (2009): 326–34.
average founder is thirty-eight: Claire Cain Miller, “The Next Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Who You Might Think,” New York Times, July 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/upshot/the-next- mark-zuckerberg-is-not-who-you-might-think.html.
writer E. M. Forster: Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
conceptual innovators are sprinters: David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
economists who won the Nobel Prize: Bruce A. Weinberg and David W. Galenson, “Creative Careers: The Life Cycles of Nobel Laureates in Economics,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 11799 (November 2005).
most often reproduced poems: David W. Galenson, “Literary Life Cycles: The Careers of Modern American Poets,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 9856 (July 2003); see also Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Life Cycles in Literature: Poets Versus Novelists or Conceptualists Versus Experimentalists?,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 1 (2007): 133–39.
independent study of every physicist: Benjamin F. Jones, E. J. Reedy, and Bruce A. Weinberg, “Age and Scientific Genius,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 19866 (January 2014); see also Benjamin F. Jones and Bruce A. Weinberg, “Age Dynamics in Scientific Creativity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 18910– 914.
when you have a hammer: Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
“putting old things in new combinations”: Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing.
“the dedicated tortoises undaunted by the blur of the hares”: Daniel H. Pink, “What Kind of Genius Are You?” Wired, July 2006, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html.
5: Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse
“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches”: Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1961).
no one did more for women’s suffrage: Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818–1893 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930); Elizabeth Frost-Knappman and Kathryn Cullen- DuPont, Women’s Suffrage in America (New York: Facts on File, 1992/2005); Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997); Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Writing Out My Heart: Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855–96 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Joan Smyth Iversen, The Antipolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880–1925: A Debate on the American Home (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Volume I (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, 1899); Ann D. Gordon, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
In 1855, she took a stand: Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim, “Making a Name: Women’s Surnames at Marriage and Beyond,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (2004): 143–60.
the concept of horizontal hostility: Judith B. White and Ellen J. Langer, “Horizontal Hostility: Relations Between Similar Minority Groups,” Journal of Social Issues 55 (1999): 537–59; Judith B. White, Michael T. Schmitt, and Ellen J. Langer, “Horizontal Hostility: Multiple Minority Groups and Differentiation from the Mainstream,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 9 (2006): 339–58; Hank Rothgerber, “Horizontal Hostility Among Non-Meat Eaters,” PLOS ONE 9 (2014): 1–6.
The more strongly you identify: Jolanda Jetten, Russell Spears, and Tom Postmes, “Intergroup Distinctiveness and Differentiation: A Meta-Analytic Integration,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86 (2004): 862–79.
The group that sang together: Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath, “Synchrony and Cooperation,”
Psychological Science 20 (2009): 1–5.
In seeking alliances: Wooseok Jung, Brayden G. King, and Sarah A. Soule, “Issue Bricolage: Explaining the Configuration of the Social Movement Sector, 1960–1995,” American Journal of Sociology 120 (2014): 187–225.
positive and negative experiences are amplified: Erica J. Boothby, Margaret S. Clark, and John A. Bargh, “Shared Experiences Are Amplified,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 2209–16.
The suffragists who formed alliances: Holly J. McCammon and Karen E. Campbell, “Allies on the Road to Victory: Coalition Formation Between the Suffragists and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” Mobilization: An International Journal 7 (2002): 231–51.
“‘this actually can work’”: Personal interview with Meredith Perry, November 13, 2014; Google Zeitgeist, September 16, 2014; Jack Hitt, “An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About,” New York Times, August 17, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/technology/an-inventor- wants-one-less-wire-to-worry-about.html?pagewanted=all; Julie Bort, “A Startup That Raised
$10 Million for Charging Gadgets Through Sound Has Sparked a Giant Debate in Silicon Valley,” Business Insider, November 2, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/startup-ubeams-10- million-debate-2014-11.
we should start with why: Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Portfolio, 2011).
become tempered radicals: Debra E. Meyerson and Maureen A. Scully, “Tempered Radicalism and the Politics of Ambivalence and Change,” Organization Science 6 (1995): 585–600.
people with extreme political views: Philip M. Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig R. Fox, and Steven A. Sloman, “Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding,” Psychological Science 24 (2013): 939–46.
“That’s when we threw the strike”: Personal interviews with Josh Steinman, December 10, 2014, and Scott Stearney, December 29, 2014.
foot-in-the-door technique: For a review, see Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 4th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001).
“The 99 Percent”: Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
insiders and outsiders have distinct ideas about who represents a coalition: Blake E. Ashforth and Peter H. Reingen, “Functions of Dysfunction: Managing the Dynamics of an Organizational Duality in a Natural Food Cooperative,” Administrative Science Quarterly 59 (2014): 474–516.
“Keep your friends close”: Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather: Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount Pictures, 1974.
Psychologists call them ambivalent relationships: Michelle K. Duffy, Daniel C. Ganster, and Milan Pagon, “Social Undermining in the Workplace,” Academy of Management Journal 45 (2002): 331–51; see also Huiwen Lian, D. Lance Ferris, and Douglas J. Brown, “Does Taking
the Good with the Bad Make Things Worse? How Abusive Supervision and Leader-Member Exchange Interact to Impact Need Satisfaction and Organizational Deviance,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 117 (2012): 41–52.
ambivalent relationships are literally unhealthier: Bert N. Uchino, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy W. Smith, and Lindsey Bloor, “Heterogeneity in Social Networks: A Comparison of Different Models Linking Relationships to Psychological Outcomes,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23 (2004): 123–39; Bert N. Uchino, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Darcy Uno, and Jeffrey B. Flinders, “Heterogeneity in the Social Networks of Young and Older Adults: Prediction of Mental Health and Cardiovascular Reactivity During Acute Stress,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 24 (2001): 361–82.
more sensitive to gains and losses in esteem: Elliot Aronson and Darwyn Linder, “Gain and Loss of Esteem as Determinants of Interpersonal Attractiveness,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1 (1965): 156–71.
“We find it more rewarding”: Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, 10th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2007).
people were most persuaded: Harold Sigall and Elliot Aronson, “Opinion Change and the Gain- Loss Model of Interpersonal Attraction,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967): 178–88.
“appears to stand up to critical scrutiny”: Ithai Stern and James D. Westphal, “Stealthy Footsteps to the Boardroom: Executives’ Backgrounds, Sophisticated Interpersonal Influence Behavior, and Board Appointments,” Administrative Science Quarterly 55 (2010): 278–319.
Essayist Chuck Klosterman: Chuck Klosterman, “The Importance of Being Hated,” Esquire, April 1, 2004, www.esquire.com/features/chuck-klostermans-america/ESQ0404-APR_AMERICA.
“Of course it was Hamlet”: Personal interviews with Rob Minkoff, October 17 and November 13, 2014.
promising ideas begin from novelty: Justin M. Berg, “The Primal Mark: How the Beginning Shapes the End in the Development of Creative Ideas,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 125 (2014): 1–17.
a form of “public motherhood”: Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620–47.
The justice argument: Holly J. McCammon, Lyndi Hewitt, and Sandy Smith, “‘No Weapon Save Argument’: Strategic Frame Amplification in the U.S. Woman Suffrage Movements,” The Sociological Quarterly 45 (2004): 529–56; Holly J. McCammon, “‘Out of the Parlors and Into the Streets’: The Changing Tactical Repertoire of the U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements,” Social Forces 81 (2003): 787–818; Lyndi Hewitt and Holly J. McCammon, “Explaining
Suffrage Mobilization: Balance, Neutralization, and Range in Collective Action Frames, 1892– 1919,” Mobilization: An International Journal 9 (2004): 149–66.
so did the passage of suffrage laws: Holly J. McCammon, “Stirring Up Suffrage Sentiment: The Formation of the State Woman’s Suffrage Organizations, 1866–1914,” Social Forces 80 (2001): 449–80; Holly J. McCammon, Karen E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg, and Christine Mowery, “How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866–1919,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 49–70; Holly J. McCammon and Karen E. Campbell, “Winning the Vote in the West: The Political Successes of the Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866–1919,” Gender & Society 15 (2001): 55–82.
To build coalitions: Herbert C. Kelman, “Group Processes in the Resolution of International Conflicts: Experiences from the Israeli-Palestinian Case,” American Psychologist 52 (1997): 212–20, and “Looking Back at My Work on Conflict Resolution in the Middle East,” Peace and Conflict 16 (2010): 361–87.
6: Rebel with a Cause
“We are not our brother’s keeper”: Harry Allen Overstreet and Bonaro Wilkinson Overstreet, The Mind Goes Forth: The Drama of Understanding (New York: Norton, 1956).
Stealing a base: Ano Katsunori, “Modified Offensive Earned-Run Average with Steal Effect for Baseball,” Applied Mathematics and Computation 120 (2001): 279–88; Josh Goldman, “Breaking Down Stolen Base Break-Even Points,” Fan Graphs, November 3, 2011, www.fangraphs.com/blogs/breaking-down-stolen-base-break-even-points/.
Stealing home is even riskier: Dan Rosenheck, “Robinson Knew Just When to Be Bold on the Base Path,” New York Times, April 17, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/sports/baseball/19score.html; Dave Anderson, “Why Nobody Steals Home Anymore,” New York Times, April 16, 1989, www.nytimes.com/1989/04/16/sports/sports-of-the-times-why-nobody-steals-home- anymore.html; Bryan Grosnick, “Grand Theft Home Plate: Stealing Home in 2012,” Beyond the Box Score, July 27, 2012, www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2012/7/27/3197011/grand-theft-home- plate-stealing-home-in-2012; Shane Tourtellotte, “And That Ain’t All, He Stole Home!”
Hardball Times, March 2, 2012, www.hardballtimes.com/and-that-aint-all-he-stole-home; Manny Randhawa, “Harrison Dazzles with Steal of Home,” April 28, 2013, MiLB.com, www.milb.com/news/print.jsp? ymd=20130428&content_id=46029428&vkey=news_t484&fext=.jsp&sid=t484; Anthony McCarron, “Jacoby Ellsbury’s Steal of Home Against Yankees Is a Page from Another Era,”
New York Daily News, April 27, 2009, www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/jacoby- ellsbury-steal-home-yankees-page-era-article-1.359870.
your odds of getting injured: Robert Preidt, “‘Plays at the Plate’ Riskiest for Pro Baseball Players,” HealthDay, January 26, 2014, consumer.healthday.com/fitness-information-14/baseball-or- softball-health-news-240/briefs-emb-1-21-baseball-collision-injuries-ijsm-wake-forest-release- batch-1109-684086.html.
steals leader: Baseball Almanac, “Single Season Leaders for Stolen Bases,” www.baseball- almanac.com/hitting/hisb2.shtml, and “Career Leaders for Stolen Bases,” www.baseball- almanac.com/hitting/hisb1.shtml.
breaking the color barrier: Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (New York: HarperCollins, 1972/1995); Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Ballantime Books, 1997); Roger Kahn, Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball (New York: Rodale Books, 2014); Harvey Frommer, Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier (New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 1982/2003).
ten players have stolen at least 70 bases in two different seasons: Rickey Henderson: Robert Buderi, “Crime Pays for Rickey Henderson, Who’s (Base) Stealing His Way Into the Record Book,” People, August 23, 1982, www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,20082931,00.html; Lou Brock: “Lou Brock Biography,” ESPN, espn.go.com/mlb/player/bio/_/id/19568/lou-brock; Vince Coleman: William C. Rhoden, “Coleman Is a Man in a Hurry,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1985/06/12/sports/coleman-is-a-man-in-a-hurry.html; Maury Wills: Bill Conlin, “The Maury Wills We Never Knew,” Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1991, articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-02-24/sports/9101180148_1_maurice-morning-wills-maury- wills-bases; Ron LeFlore: Bill Staples and Rich Herschlag, Before the Glory: 20 Baseball
Heroes Talk About Growing Up and Turning Hard Times Into Home Runs (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.: 1997); Omar Moreno: Personal communication with Jim Trdinich, February 1, 2015; Tim Raines: Ron Fimrite, “Don’t Knock the Rock,” Sports Illustrated, June 25, 1984, www.si.com/vault/1984/06/25/619862/dont-knock-the-rock; Willie Wilson: Willie Wilson, Inside the Park: Running the Base Path of Life (Olathe, KS: Ascend Books, 2013); Marquis Grissom: Jerome Holtzman, “Marquis Grissom Is Newest Hero of the Fall,” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1997, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-10- 24/sports/9710240033_1_american-league-champion-marquis-grissom-bases; Kenny Lofton: Associated Press, “Former Wildcat Lofton Debuts with Atlanta, Goes 2-for-4,” Arizona Daily Wildcat, March 28, 1997, http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/90/122/20_1_m.html.
brothers who played professional baseball: Frank J. Sulloway and Richard L. Zweigenhaft, “Birth Order and Risk Taking in Athletics: A Meta-Analysis and Study of Major League Baseball,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14 (2010): 402–16.
“father of modern base-stealing”: David Falkner, Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson, from Baseball to Birmingham (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
“a certain amount of nerve”: Rod Carew, Carew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); Martin Miller, “Rod Carew Becomes Champion for the Abused,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-12-12/local/me-8068_1_rod-carew.
third ranked, Paul Molitor: McCarron, “Jacoby Ellsbury’s Steal of Home”; Ken Rosenthal, “You Can Go Home Again, Says Molitor,” Baltimore Sun, April 6, 1996, articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-04-06/sports/1996097010_1_molitor-twins-orioles; Jim Souhan, “My Day with Molitor in 1996,” Star Tribune, November 4, 2014, www.startribune.com/souhan-blog-my-day-with-molitor-in-1996/281481701; Bill Koenig,
“Molitor Is Safe at Home,” USA Today, June 6, 1996, usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/sbbw0442.htm.
two dozen major scientific revolutions: Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Vintage, 1997), “Birth Order and Evolutionary
Psychology: A Meta-Analytic Overview,” Psychological Inquiry 6 (1995): 75–80, and “Sources of Scientific Innovation: A Meta-Analytic Approach (Commentary on Simonton, 2009),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4 (2009): 455–59.
Overall, laterborns were twice: Frank J. Sulloway, “Born to Rebel and Its Critics,” Politics and the Life Sciences 19 (2000): 181–202, and “Birth Order and Political Rebellion: An Assessment, with Biographical Data on Political Activists” (2002), www.sulloway.org/politics.html.
logic of consequence: James March, A Primer on Decision-Making: How Decisions Happen (New York: Free Press, 1994); see also J. Mark Weber, Shirli Kopelman, and David M. Messick, “A Conceptual Review of Decision Making in Social Dilemmas: Applying a Logic of Appropriateness,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004): 281–307.
advantages of being firstborn: Roger D. Clark and Glenn A. Rice, “Family Constellations and Eminence: The Birth Orders of Nobel Prize Winners,” Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 110 (1981): 281–87; Richard L. Zweigenhaft, “Birth Order, Approval-Seeking and Membership in Congress,” Journal of Individual Psychology 31 (1975): 205–10; Rudy B. Andeweg and Steef B. Van Den Berg, “Linking Birth Order to Political Leadership: The Impact of Parents or Sibling Interaction?,” Political Psychology 24 (2003): 605–23; Blema S. Steinberg, “The Making of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers: The Impact of Birth Order, Sex of Siblings, and Father-Daughter Dynamics,” Political Psychology 22 (2001): 89–110; Del Jones, “First-born Kids Become CEO Material,” USA Today, September 4, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-09-03-ceo-birth_N.htm; Ben Dattner, “Birth Order and Leadership,” www.dattnerconsulting.com/birth.html.
Laterborns have faster salary growth: Marco Bertoni and Giorgio Brunello, “Laterborns Don’t Give Up: The Effects of Birth Order on Earnings in Europe,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 7679, October 26, 2013, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2345596.
birth order was a better predictor: Delroy J. Paulhus, Paul D. Trapnell, and David Chen, “Birth Order Effects on Personality and Achievement Within Families,” Psychological Science 1999 (10): 482–88; Sulloway, “Born to Rebel and Its Critics,” and “Why Siblings Are Like Darwin’s Finches: Birth Order, Sibling Competition, and Adaptive Divergence Within the Family,” in The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences, eds. David M. Buss and Patricia H. Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Laura M. Argys, Daniel I. Rees, Susan L. Averett, and Benjama Witoonchart, “Birth Order and Risky Adolescent Behavior,” Economic Inquiry 44 (2006): 215–33; Daniela Barni, Michele Roccato, Alessio Vieno, and Sara Alfieri, “Birth Order and Conservatism: A Multilevel Test of Sulloway’s ‘Born to Rebel’ Thesis,” Personality and Individual Differences 66 (2014): 58–63.
When identical twins grow up: Steven Pinker, “What Is the Missing Ingredient—Not Genes, Not Upbringing—That Shapes the Mind?,” Edge, edge.org/response-detail/11078, and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Eric Turkheimer and Mary Waldron, “Nonshared Environment: A Theoretical, Methodological, and Quantitative Review,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 78–108; Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels, “Why Are Children in the Same Family So Different from Each Other?,” International Journal of Epidemiology 40 (2011): 563–82.
adopted siblings don’t resemble: Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., and John C. Loehlin, “Genes, Evolution, and Personality,” Behavior Genetics 31 (2001): 243–73; John C. Loehlin, Genes and Environment in Personality Development (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); John C. Loehlin, Robert R. McCrae, Paul T. Costa, Jr., and Oliver P. John, “Heritabilities of Common and Measure-Specific Components of the Big Five Personality Factors,” Journal of Research in Personality 32 (1998): 431–53.
“The niche of the responsible”: Sulloway, Born to Rebel; Helen Koch, “Some Personality Correlates of Sex, Sibling Position, and Sex of Sibling Among Five- and Six-Year-Old Children,” Genetic Psychology Monographs 52 (1955): 3–50; Frank Dumont, A History of Personality Psychology: Theory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); “How is Personality Formed? A Talk with Frank J. Sulloway,” Edge, May 17, 1998, https://edge.org/conversation/how-is-personality- formed-.
comedians tend to be more original and rebellious: Gil Greengross and Geoffrey F. Miller, “The Big Five Personality Traits of Professional Comedians Compared to Amateur Comedians, Comedy Writers, and College Students,” Personality and Individual Differences 47 (2009): 79– 83; Gil Greengross, Rod A. Martin, and Geoffrey Miller, “Personality Traits, Intelligence, Humor Styles, and Humor Production Ability of Professional Stand-Up Comedians Compared to College Students,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6 (2012): 74–82.
people laugh when: A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1141–49.
Jim Carrey’s father: Jim Carrey, “Official Commencement Address Graduating Class of 2014 from Maharishi University of Management,” May 24, 2014. www.mum.edu/whats- happening/graduation-2014/full-jim-carrey-address-video-and-transcript.
“I never had a job”: Seinfeld, “The Calzone,” NBC, April 25, 1996.
Comedy Central’s 2004 list: Comedy Central, “100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time,” www.listology.com/list/comedy-central-100-greatest-standups-all-time.
When I tracked the birth order of these hundred original comedians: Adam M. Grant, “Funny Babies: Great Comedians Are Born Last in Big Families,” working paper (2015).
more older brothers: Ray Blanchard, “Fraternal Birth Order and the Maternal Immune Hypothesis of Male Homosexuality,” Hormones and Behavior 40 (2001): 105–14, and “Quantitative and Theoretical Analyses of the Relation Between Older Brothers and Homosexuality in Men,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology 21 (2004): 173–87; James M. Cantor, Ray Blanchard, Andrew
D. Paterson, and Anthony F. Bogaert, “How Many Gay Men Owe Their Sexual Orientation to Fraternal Birth Order?,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 31 (2002): 63–71; Ray Blanchard and Richard Lippa, “Birth Order, Sibling Sex Ratio, Handedness, and Sexual Orientation of Male and Female Participants in a BBC Internet Research Project,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 36 (2007): 163–176; Anthony F. Bogaert, Ray Blanchard, and Lesley E. Crosthwait, “Interaction of Birth Order, Handedness, and Sexual Orientation in the Kinsey Interview Data,” Behavioral
Neuroscience 121 (2007): 845–53; Alicia Garcia-Falgueras and Dick F. Swaab, “Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation,” Endocrine Development 17 (2010): 22–35.
parents tend to start out: Robert B. Zajonc, “Family Configuration and Intelligence,” Science 192 (1976): 227–36, and “Validating the Confluence Model,” Psychological Bulletin 93 (1983): 457–80; Robert B. Zajonc and Patricia R. Mullally, “Birth Order: Reconciling Conflicting Effects,” American Psychologist 52 (1997): 685–799; Heidi Keller and Ulrike Zach, “Gender and Birth Order as Determinants of Parental Behaviour,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 26 (2002): 177–84; J. Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer, “Mothers’ Favoritism in Later Life: The Role of Children’s Birth Order,” Research on Aging 29 (2007): 32–55.
The poster victim: Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 2009). For evidence that the children treated with the greatest hostility by parents are the most likely to rebel, see Katherine Jewsbury Conger and Rand D. Conger, “Differential Parenting and Change in Sibling Differences in Delinquency,” Journal of Family Psychology 8 (1994): 287–302.
“We were going to make fun”: Personal interview with Lizz Winstead, February 8, 2015, and Lizz Winstead, Lizz Free or Die: Essays (New York: Riverhead, 2012).
“I’m from a very large family”: Jim Gaffigan, “The Youngest Child,” Comedy Central Presents, July 11, 2000, www.cc.com/video-clips/g92efr/comedy-central-presents-the-youngest-child; see also Ben Kharakh, “Jim Gaffigan, Comedian and Actor,” Gothamist, July 17, 2006, http://gothamist.com/2006/07/17/jim_gaffigan_co.php#.
only children grow up: Sulloway, “Why Siblings Are Like Darwin’s Finches”; Catherine A. Salmon and Martin Daly, “Birth Order and Familial Sentiment: Middleborns Are Different,” Evolution and Human Behavior 19 (1998): 299–312.
“50 discipline encounters”: Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
“Explained is the word”: Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Touchstone, 1992); Samuel P. Oliner, “Ordinary Heroes,” Yes! Magazine, November 5, 2001, www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-love-save-the-world/ordinary-
heroes; see also Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
Parents of highly creative children: John S. Dacey, “Discriminating Characteristics of the Families of Highly Creative Adolescents,” The Journal of Creative Behavior 23 (1989): 263–71.
“place emphasis on moral values”: Teresa M. Amabile, Growing Up Creative: Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity (Buffalo, NY: Creative Education Foundation, 1989).
teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner: Maarten Vansteenkiste, Bart Soenens, Stijn Van Petegem, and Bart Duriez, “Longitudinal Associations Between Adolescent Perceived Degree and Style of Parental Prohibition and Internalization and Defiance,”
Developmental Psychology 50 (2014): 229–36; see also Sharon S. Brehm and Jack W. Brehm, Psychological Reactance: A Theory of Freedom and Control (New York: Academic Press, 1981).
a factor that distinguished the creative: Donald W. MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–95, and “Personality and the Realization of Creative Potential,” American Psychologist 20 (1965): 273–81.
“Guilt is the gift”: John Skow, “Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck,” Time, July 2, 1984.
merely mentioning patients: Adam M. Grant and David A. Hofmann, “It’s Not All About Me: Motivating Hand Hygiene Among Health Care Professionals by Focusing on Patients,” Psychological Science 22 (2011): 1494–99.
explanations of our impact: Carolyn Zahn-Wexler, Marian Radke-Yarrow, and Robert A. King, “Child Rearing and Children’s Prosocial Initiations Toward Victims of Distress,” Child
Development 50 (1979): 319–30; Seth Izen, “Childhood Discipline and the Development of Moral Courage,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Lowell, www.uml.edu/docs/Childhood%20Discipline%20and%20the%20Development%20of%20Moral
%20Courage%20Thesis_tcm18-90752.pdf; see also Eleanor E. Maccoby, “The Role of Parents in the Socialization of Children: An Historical Overview,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1992): 1006–17.
character praise: Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler, “Attribution, Reinforcement, and Altruism: A Developmental Analysis,” Developmental Psychology 16 (1980): 525–34.
Children who received character praise: Adam Grant, “Raising a Moral Child,” New York Times,
April 11, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-a-moral-child.html.
even among very young children: Christopher J. Bryan, Allison Master, and Gregory M. Walton, “‘Helping’ Versus ‘Being a Helper’: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children,” Child Development 85 (2014): 1836–42.
appeals to character are effective: Christopher J. Bryan, Gabrielle S. Adams, and Benoît Monin, “When Cheating Would Make You a Cheater: Implicating the Self Prevents Unethical Behavior,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142 (2013): 1001–5.
give up in the face of failure: Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006).
Having a role model: Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda, “Increasing the Salience of One’s Best Selves Can Undermine Inspiration by Outstanding Role Models,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76 (1999): 214–28; see also Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York: Freeman, 1997).
Mentioning a mentor: Bill E. Peterson and Abigail J. Stewart, “Antecedents and Contexts of Generativity Motivation at Midlife,” Psychology and Aging 11 (1996): 21–33.
Malala Yousafzai was moved: Jodi Kantor, “Malala Yousafzai: By the Book,” New York Times, August 19, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/malala-yousafzai-by-the- book.html.
King was inspired by Gandhi: Rufus Burrow Jr., Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014).
as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12- 06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy.
Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in.
Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks- Zero-to-One-5771228.php.
Sheryl Sandberg . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Sheryl Sandberg: By the Book,” New York Times, March 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/sheryl-sandberg-by-the-book.html.
Jeff Bezos . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Jeffrey P. Bezos Recommended Reading”: www.achievement.org/autodoc/bibliography/WrinkleinT_1.
Mark Zuckerberg Ender’s Game: Alyson Shontell, “The Books That Inspired Tech’s Most
Influential People,” Business Insider, June 26, 2013, www.businessinsider.com/the-books-that- influenced-techs-most-influencial-ceos 2013-6?op=1.
Jack Ma . . . Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: Helen H. Wang, “Alibaba Saga III: Jack Ma Discovered the Internet,” Forbes, July 17, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/helenwang/2014/07/17/alibaba-saga-iii/.
when children’s stories emphasize original achievements: Richard DeCharms and Gerald H. Moeller, “Values Expressed in American Children’s Readers, 1800–1950,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 64 (1962): 136–42; see also David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand Co., 1961); Stefan Engeser, Falko Rheinberg, and Matthias Möller, “Achievement Motive Imagery in German Schoolbooks: A Pilot Study Testing McClelland’s Hypothesis,” Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 110–13; Stefan Engeser, Ina Hollricher, and Nicola Baumann, “The Stories Children’s Books Tell Us: Motive- Related Imagery in Children’s Books and Their Relation to Academic Performance and Crime Rates,” Journal of Research in Personality 47 (2013): 421–26.
“grow up and contribute”: Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guilford Press, 1994).
making the impossible seem possible: Mark Strauss, “Ten Inventions Inspired by Science Fiction,” Smithsonian magazine, March 15, 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten- inventions-inspired-by-science-fiction-128080674/?no-ist.
reading Harry Potter can improve: Loris Vezzali, Sofia Stathi, Dino Giovannini, Dora Capozza, and Elena Trifiletti, “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 45 (2015): 105–21.
7: Rethinking Groupthink
“In fact, the only sin”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893).
Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid: Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, “Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging,” Strategic Management Journal 21 (2000): 1147–61; Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Milton P. Dentch, Fall of an Icon: Polaroid After Edwin H. Land: An Insider’s View of the Once Great Company (New York: Riverhaven Books, 2012); Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012); Peter C. Wensberg, Land’s Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); David Sheff, “Steve Jobs,” Playboy, February 1985, http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs; Brian Dumaine, “How Polaroid Flashed Back,” Fortune, February 16, 1987, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/02/16/68669/index.htm.
a group becomes that cohesive: Charles A. O’Reilly and Jennifer A. Chatman, “Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults, and Commitment,” Research in Organizational Behavior 18 (1996): 157–200.
Had Kennedy’s advisers: Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003).
problem with the cohesion theory: Sally Riggs Fuller and Ramon J. Aldag, “Organizational Tonypandy: Lessons from a Quarter Century of the Groupthink Phenomenon,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 163–84; Roderick M. Kramer, “Revisiting the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam Decisions 25 Years Later: How Well Has the Groupthink Hypothesis Stood the Test of Time?,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 236–71; Glen Whyte, “Recasting Janis’s Groupthink Model: The Key Role of Collective Efficacy in Decision Fiascoes,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 185–209; Clark McCauley, “Group Dynamics in Janis’s Theory of Groupthink: Backward and Forward,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 142–62; Randall S. Peterson, Pamela D. Owens, Philip E. Tetlock, Elliott T. Fan, and Paul Martorana, “Group Dynamics in Top Management Teams: Groupthink, Vigilance, and Alternative Models of Organizational Failure and Success,” Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 272–305; Philip E. Tetlock, Randall S. Peterson, Charles McGuire, Shi-jie Chang, and Peter Feld, “Assessing Political Group Dynamics: A Test of the Groupthink Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63 (1992): 403–25; Ramon
J. Aldag and Sally Riggs Fuller, “Beyond Fiasco: A Reappraisal of the Groupthink Phenomenon and a New Model of Group Decision Processes,” Psychological Bulletin 113 (1993): 533–52; Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); Steve W. J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7 (2006): 77–124; Anthony R. Pratkanis and Marlene E. Turner, “Methods for Counteracting Groupthink Risk: A Critical Appraisal,” International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management 2 (2013): 18–38; Francis J. Flynn and Jennifer A. Chatman, “Strong Cultures and Innovation: Oxymoron or Opportunity?” The International Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (2001): 263–87.
one blueprint was far superior: James N. Baron and Michael T. Hannan, “Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Startups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies,” California Management Review 44 (2002): 8–36; Michael T. Hannan, James N. Baron, Greta Hsu, and Ozgecan Kocak, “Organizational Identities and the Hazard of Change,” Industrial and Corporate Change 15 (2006): 755–84.
what got you here won’t get you there: Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hachette, 2007).
organizations tend to become more homogeneous: Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992); Benjamin Schneider, “The People Make the Place,” Personnel Psychology 40 (1987): 437–53; Benjamin Schneider, D. Brent Smith, and Harold W. Goldstein, “Attraction-Selection-Attrition: Toward a Person-Environment Psychology of Organizations,” in Person-Environment Psychology: Models and Perspectives (2000): 61–85.
in stable industries, large companies: Jesper Sørensen, “The Strength of Corporate Culture and the Reliability of Firm Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47 (2002): 70–91.
CEOs sought advice from friends: Michael L. McDonald and James D. Westphal, “Getting By with the Advice of Their Friends: CEOs’ Advice Networks and Firms’ Strategic Responses to Poor Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 48 (2003): 1–32.
generated 16 percent more ideas: Charlan J. Nemeth, Bernard Personnaz, Marie Personnaz, and Jack A. Goncalo, “The Liberating Role of Conflict in Group Creativity: A Study in Two Countries,” European Journal of Social Psychology 34 (2004): 365–74.
debate and criticism improve: Kevin Dunbar, “How Scientists Really Reason: Scientific Reasoning in Real-World Laboratories,” in The Nature of Insight, eds., Robert J. Sternberg and Janet E. Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) 365–95; Chip Heath, Richard P. Larrick, and Joshua Klayman, “Cognitive Repairs: How Organizational Practices Can Compensate for Individual Shortcomings,” Research in Organizational Behavior 20 (1998): 1–37; Robert S. Dooley and Gerald E. Fryxell, “Attaining Decision Quality and Commitment from Dissent: The Moderating Effects of Loyalty and Competence in Strategic Decision-Making Teams,” Academy of Management Journal 42 (1999): 389–402.
“Minority viewpoints”: Charlan J. Nemeth, “Differential Contributions of Majority and Minority Influence,” Psychological Review 93 (1986): 23–32; Stefan Schulz-Hardt, Felix C. Brodbeck, Andreas Mojzisch, Rudolf Kerschreiter, and Dieter Frey, “Group Decision Making in Hidden Profile Situations: Dissent as a Facilitator for Decision Quality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91 (2006): 1080–93.
Bridgewater has prevented groupthink: Personal interviews with Zack Wieder and Mark Kirby, June 24, 2014; personal interviews with Zack Wieder, January 12, February 9 and 16, and April
16, 2015; personal interviews with Ray Dalio, July 31, 2014, and February 12, 2015; and many hours of additional interviews, observations, videos, and cases from current and former Bridgewater employees between June 2014 and January 2015; Ray Dalio, “Principles,” www.bwater.com/home/culture—principles.aspx; Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller, “Making Business Personal,” Harvard Business Review, April 2014, 45– 52; Kevin Roose, “Pursuing Self-Interest in Harmony with the Laws of the Universe and Contributing to Evolution Is Universally Rewarded,” New York Magazine, April 10, 2001, http://nymag.com/news/business/wallstreet/ray-dalio-2011-4/; Jeffrey T. Polzer and Heidi K. Gardner, “Bridgewater Associates,” Harvard Business School Video Case 413-702, May 2013, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=44831.
As Jack Handey advised: Jack Handey, Saturday Night Live, 1991.
“Cultural fit”: Lauren A. Rivera, “Guess Who Doesn’t Fit In at Work,” The New York Times, May 30, 2015,: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-who-doesnt-fit-in-at- work.html.
IDEO: Personal communication with Duane Bray, January 30, 2014.
bring in someone to oppose: Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, “Minority Influence Theory,” in Handbook of Theories in Social Psychology 2 (2012): 362–78; Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown, and John Rogers, “Devil’s Advocate Versus Authentic Dissent: Stimulating Quantity and Quality,” European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (2001): 707–20; personal communication with Charlan Nemeth, January 15, 2015; Roger B. Porter, Presidential Decision Making: The Economic Policy Board (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
designated to dissent: Stefan Schulz-Hardt, Marc Jochims, and Dieter Frey, “Productive Conflict in Group Decision-Making: Genuine and Contrived Dissent as Strategies to Counteract Biased Information Seeking,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 88 (2002): 563–86.
“strong opinions, weakly held”: Paul Saffo, “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held,” July 26, 2008, www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/08/16/paul-saffo-forecasting-is-strong-opinions-weakly-held/.
when employees bring solutions: Jian Liang, Crystal I. C. Farh, and Jiing-Lih Farh, “Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination,” Academy of Management Journal 55 (2012): 71–92.
a culture of advocacy: David A. Hofmann, “Overcoming the Obstacles to Cross-Functional Decision Making: Laying the Groundwork for Collaborative Problem Solving,” Organizational Dynamics (2015); personal conversations with David Hofmann and Jeff Edwards, March 2008.
“Canaries”: Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! Insights from Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead (New York: Twelve, 2015).
“knowing others’ preferences”: Andreas Mojzisch and Stefan Schulz-Hardt, “Knowing Others’ Preferences Degrades the Quality of Group Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98 (2010): 794–808.
when groups consider options: Andrea B. Hollingshead, “The Rank-Order Effect in Group Decision Making,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 68 (1996): 181– 93.
“Argue like you’re right”: Quoted in Robert I. Sutton, “It’s Up to You to Start a Good Fight,”
Harvard Business Review, August 3, 2010.
At the software company Index Group: Personal interview with Tom Gerrity, July 12, 2011.
professional theaters: Zannie G. Voss, Daniel M. Cable, and Glenn B. Voss, “Organizational Identity and Firm Performance: What Happens When Leaders Disagree About ‘Who We Are?,’” Organization Science 17 (2006): 741–55.
The more core principles: Andrew Carton, Chad Murphy, and Jonathan Clark, “A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric About Ultimate Goals Influences Performance,” Academy
of Management Journal 57 (2014): 1544–70.
field of evidence-based management: Trish Reay, Whitney Berta, and Melanie Kazman Kohn, “What’s the Evidence on Evidence-Based Management?,” Academy of Management Perspectives (November 2009): 5–18.
8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping It Steady
“I learned that courage”: Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1995).
Instead of visualizing success: Personal interview with Lewis Pugh, June 10, 2014, and personal communication, February 15, 2015; Lewis Pugh, Achieving the Impossible (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) and 21 Yaks and a Speedo: How to Achieve Your Impossible (Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2013); “Swimming Toward Success” speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2014.
effective strategies for managing emotions: Adam M. Grant, “Rocking the Boat But Keeping It Steady: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Employee Voice,” Academy of Management Journal 56 (2013): 1703–23.
U.S. government leaders: Steven Kelman, Ronald Sanders, Gayatri Pandit, and Sarah Taylor, “‘I Won’t Back Down?’ Complexity and Courage in Federal Decision-Making,” Harvard Kennedy School of Government RWP13-044 (2013).
dedicated environmentalists: Scott Sonenshein, Katherine A. DeCelles, and Jane E. Dutton, “It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Role of Self-Evaluations in Explaining Support of Environmental Issues,” Academy of Management Journal 57 (2014): 7–37.
strategic optimism and defensive pessimism: Julie K. Norem and Nancy Cantor, “Defensive Pessimism: Harnessing Anxiety as Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 1208–17; Stacie M. Spencer and Julie K. Norem, “Reflection and Distraction: Defensive Pessimism, Strategic Optimism, and Performance,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 354–65; Julie K. Norem and K. S. Shaun Illingworth, “Strategy- Dependent Effects of Reflecting on Self and Tasks: Some Implications of Optimism and Defensive Pessimism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 822–35; Julie
K. Norem and Edward C. Chang, “The Positive Psychology of Negative Thinking,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 58 (2002): 993–1001; Tim Jarvis, “The Power of Negative Thinking,” O, The Oprah Magazine, March 2009, http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Defensive-Pessimism-How- Negative-Thinking-Can-Pay-Off.
when presidents are too optimistic: A. Timur Sevincer, Greta Wagner, Johanna Kalvelage, and Gabriele Oettingen, “Positive Thinking About the Future in Newspaper Reports and Presidential Addresses Predicts Economic Downturn,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 1010–17.
ordinary people list their fears: Kaya Burgess, “Speaking in Public Is Worse Than Death for Most,” Times (London), October 30, 2013, www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article3908129.ece; Karen Kangas Dwyer and Marlina M. Davidson, “Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?,” Communication Research Reports 29 (2012): 99–107; Jerry Seinfeld, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL7fTLjFzAg.
calm versus excited: Alison Wood Brooks, “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143 (2014): 1144–58.
a stop system and a go system: Charles S. Carver and Teri L. White, “Behavioral Inhibition, Behavioral Activation, and Affective Responses to Impending Reward and Punishment: The BIS/BAS Scales,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 319–33.
“Your stop system”: Susan Cain, “Why You Fear Public Speaking, and What to Do About It,” accessed on September 18, 2014, at www.thepowerofintroverts.com/2011/02/08/public- speaking-for-introverts-and-other-microphone-averse-people-tip-2.
the unknown is more terrifying: Jacob B. Hirsh and Michael Inzlicht, “The Devil You Know: Neuroticism Predicts Neural Response to Uncertainty,” Psychological Science 19 (2008): 962– 67.
“they feel more in control”: Olga Khazan, “The Upside of Pessimism,” Atlantic, September 12, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/dont-think-positively/379993.
Popovic’s approaches to: Personal interview with Srdja Popovic, February 8, 2015; Srdja Popovic,
Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent
Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015); Bringing Down a Dictator, directed by Steven York, WETA, in association with York Zimerman, 2002; Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, The Humor Code: A
Global Search for What Makes Things Funny (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Srdja Popovic, “Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2013; CANVAS library, accessed on December 26, 2014, at www.canvasopedia.org/index.php/library.
developing a Skype vision: Personal interviews with Josh Silverman, October 24, November 12, and December 2, 2014.
Outsourcing Inspiration: Adam M. Grant and David A. Hofmann, “Outsourcing Inspiration: The Performance Effects of Ideological Messages from Leaders and Beneficiaries,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 116 (2011): 173–87.
inspired to achieve the highest performance: Adam M. Grant, “Leading with Meaning: Beneficiary Contact, Prosocial Impact, and the Performance Effects of Transformational Leadership,” Academy of Management Journal 55 (2012): 458–76.
judge the lengths of different lines: Solomon E. Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Scientific American 193 (1955): 31–35, and “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70 (1956): 1–70; see also Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith, “Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task,” Psychological Bulletin 119 (1996): 111–37.
“The first follower”: Derek Sivers, “How to Start a Movement,” TED Talks, April 2010, www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement/transcript?language=en.
“Never doubt that a small group”: Margaret Mead, The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future, ed. Robert B. Textor (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
just having one friend: Sigal G. Barsade and Hakan Ozcelik, “Not Alone But Lonely: Work Loneliness and Employee Performance,” working paper (2011).
They were treated so poorly: Robert I. Sutton, “Breaking the Cycle of Abuse in Medicine,” March 13, 2007, accessed on February 24, 2015, at bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/03/breaking_the_cy.html.
“By the time we were ready”: Personal interview with Brian Goshen, September 22, 2014.
championed environmental issues: Lynne M. Andersson and Thomas S. Bateman, “Individual Environmental Initiative: Championing Natural Environmental Issues in U.S. Business Organizations,” Academy of Management Journal 43 (2000): 548–70.
sense of urgency: John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
dramatically shift risk preferences: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (1981): 453–58; Max Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making (New York: John Wiley, 1994).
perceive the new behavior as safe or risky: Alexander J. Rothman, Roger D. Bartels, Jhon Wlaschin, and Peter Salovey, “The Strategic Use of Gain- and Loss-Framed Messages to Promote Healthy Behavior: How Theory Can Inform Practice,” Journal of Communication 56 (2006): 202–20.
“kill the company” exercise: Lisa Bodell, Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution (New York: Bibliomotion, 2012).
“The greatest communicators”: Nancy Duarte, “The Secret Structure of Great Talks,” TEDxEast, November 2011, www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.
The exercise capitalizes: Anita Williams Woolley, “Playing Offense vs. Defense: The Effects of Team Strategic Orientation on Team Process in Competitive Environments,” Organization Science 22 (2011): 1384–98.
“This great nation”: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1933.
“one hundred years later”: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I have a dream” speech, August 28, 1963; Clarence B. Jones, Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).
“King articulates the crowd’s”: Patricia Wasielewski, “The Emotional Basis of Charisma,”
Symbolic Interaction 8 (1985): 207–22.
when we’re experiencing doubts: Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach, “Dynamics of Self- Regulation: How (Un)accomplished Goal Actions Affect Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94 (2008): 183–95.
“Instead of courage”: Tom Peters, December 30, 2013, www.facebook.com/permalink.php? story_fbid=10151762619577396&id=10666812395.
“simultaneously hot- and cool-headed”: Debra E. Meyerson and Maureen A. Scully, “Tempered Radicalism and the Politics of Ambivalence and Change,” Organization Science 6 (1995): 585– 600.
surface acting and deep acting: Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (California: University of California Press, 1983).
method acting: Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1936/2013); Chris Sullivan, “How Daniel Day-Lewis’ Notoriously Rigorous Role Preparation Has Yielded Another Oscar Contender,” The Independent, February 1, 2008.
surface acting burns us out: Alicia Grandey, “When ‘The Show Must Go On’: Surface Acting and Deep Acting as Determinants of Emotional Exhaustion and Peer-Rated Service Delivery,” Academy of Management Journal 46 (2003): 86–96; Ute R. Hülsheger and Anna F. Schewe, “On the Costs and Benefits of Emotional Labor: A Meta-Analysis of Three Decades of Research,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 16 (2011): 361–89.
To prepare citizens: Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black
Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Rufus Burrow, Jr., Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014); Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remarks in Favor of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” June 27, 1956, accessed on February 24, 2015, at www.usnews.com/news/blogs/press-past/2013/02/04/remembering-rosa-parks-on-her-100th- birthday; Martin Luther King, Jr., interview with Kenneth Clark, accessed on February 24, 2015, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/mlk/sfeature/sf_video_pop_03_tr_qt.html.
hitting a pillow: Analyze This, directed by Harold Ramis, Warner Bros., 1999.
To test whether venting helps: Brad J. Bushman, “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 724–31; Brad J. Bushman, Roy F. Baumeister, and Angela D. Stack, “Catharsis, Aggression, and Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self- Defeating Prophecies?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76 (1999): 367–76; Brad
J. Bushman, Angela M. Bonacci, William C. Pedersen, Eduardo A. Vasquez, and Norman Miller, “Chewing on It Can Chew You Up: Effects of Rumination on Triggered Displaced Aggression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (2005): 969–83.
Catharsis seems to work best: Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change (New York: Little, Brown, 2011); Jonathan I. Bisson, Peter L. Jenkins, Julie Alexander, and Carol Bannister, “Randomised Controlled Trial of Psychological Debriefing for Victims of Acute Burn Trauma,” British Journal of Psychiatry 171 (1997): 78– 81; Benedict Carey, “Sept. 11 Revealed Psychology’s Limits, Review Finds,” New York Times, July 28, 2011; James W. Pennebaker, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).
channel anger productively: Andrew Brodsky, Joshua D. Margolis, and Joel Brockner, “Speaking Truth to Power: A Full Cycle Approach,” working paper (2015).
Focusing on the victim: Guy D. Vitaglione and Mark A. Barnett, “Assessing a New Dimension of Empathy: Empathic Anger as a Predictor of Helping and Punishing Desires,” Motivation and Emotion 27 (2003): 301–25; C. Daniel Batson, Christopher L. Kennedy, Lesley-Anne Nord, E.
L. Stocks, D’Yani A. Fleming, Christian M. Marzette, David A. Lishner, Robin E. Hayes, Leah
M. Kolchinsky, and Tricia Zerger, “Anger at Unfairness: Is It Moral Outrage?,” European
Journal of Social Psychology 37 (2007): 1272–85; Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart, James R. Detert, Linda Klebe Trevino, and Amy C. Edmondson, “Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work,” Research in Organizational Behavior 29 (2009): 163–93.
“I arise in the morning”: Israel Shenker, “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author,” New York Times, July 11, 1969: www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/lifetimes/white-notes.html.
happiness of pursuit: Brian R. Little, Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014); Brian R. Little, “Personal Projects and Social Ecology: Lives, Liberties and the Happiness of Pursuit,” Colloquium presentation, department of psychology, University of Michigan (1992); Brian R. Little, “Personality Science and the Northern Tilt: As Positive as Possible Under the Circumstances,” in Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward, eds. K. M. Sheldon, T. B. Kashdan, and M. F. Steger (New York: Oxford University Press, 228–47).
Action for Impact
rapid-innovation cell: Personal interviews with Benjamin Kohlmann, November 19 and December 10, 2014.
Innovation tournaments are highly efficient: Karl Ulrich and Christian Terwiesch, Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2009); “Why Some Innovation Tournaments Succeed and Others Fail,”
Knowledge@Wharton, February 20, 2014, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation- tournaments-succeed-others-fail.
Picture yourself as the enemy: Lisa Bodell, Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution (New York: Bibliomotion, 2012).
At DreamWorks Animation: Anita Bruzzese, “DreamWorks Is Believer in Every Employee’s Creativity,” USA Today, July 23, 2012, usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/workplace/bruzzese/story/2012-07-22/dreamworks- values-innovation-in-all-workers/56376470/1.
add skill variety: Robert I. Sutton and Andrew Hargadon, “Brainstorming Groups in Context: Effectiveness in a Product Design Firm,” Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1996): 685–718.
Ban the words like, love, and hate: Personal interviews with Nancy Lublin, December 12, 2014, and February 23, 2015.
Jigsaw Classroom: Elliot Aronson and Shelley Patnoe, Cooperation in the Classroom: The Jigsaw Method (New York: Addison Wesley, 1997).