Book Report – Originals by Adam Grant

Adam Grant’s Give and Take was so good – indeed life-altering for anyone trying to embody a giving nature without becoming a doormat – that seeing he had a new release meant an instant purchase. Grant has proven to be a terrific writer who surely genuflects at the alter of Malcolm Gladwell and the Heath Brothers, having worked similar magic by re-positioning key points countless times without ever patronizing the reader or being annoyingly redundant. Alas, this is what made reading his new book, Originals, so terribly vexing. Whereas his first one had to be flagged, discussed, debated, and absorbed, the new one is, well, meh – just kind of there. There is no common theme, thread, or rallying cry and after 50 pages it was a chore to finish, mainly due to the random nature of his subjects. He calls them all world-changing non-conformists and yet in his otherwise capable hands, the collection of their stories comes off like a jumbo shit sandwich. No really, Professor – who cares?

Mercifully, there are a half-dozen takeaways. To wit:

• Steve Jobs backed the Segway and couldn’t have been more wrong about how it would alter daily travel. Duly note: You cannot chant cancer out of your system and you should listen to advisors (read: women) who point out that you cannot carry shopping bags whilst aboard that goofy Paul Blart machine.

• “It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality,” writes Grant regarding idea generation, “but this turns out to be false.” Studies prove that creativity is a numbers game and the more ideas you have, the more successful you’ll be at advancing them.

• It’s your peers who are best suited to determine the veracity of your ideas. The key is to avoid the false negatives often concluded by biased audiences. Our colleagues are “open to seeing the potential in unusual possibilities” whereas managers, for example, are too keen on sticking to existing prototypes.

• Polaroid helped pioneer the digital camera yet went bankrupt because of it. D’oh! Top executives believed that users would always want hard copies of pictures and not enough of them questioned this faulty notion. “It was a classic case of groupthink,” says the author, “the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent.”

• It’s fun and productive to play a game called Kill the Company. Simply order up a bunch of tuna sandwiches and sit around the conference room trying to dream up ways to either put your own company out of business or render useless your most popular product, service, or technology. Nice way to freshen up the weekly staff meeting, huh?

• We should turn the adage “don’t bring me a problem without a solution” on its ear. “If people rush to answers, you end up with more advocacy than inquiry,” according to Grant. We’re better off encouraging staff to bring us only problems and then working together to agree on which ones to solve.

There you have it. Keep the $27 ($35 Canadian) and just work on this stuff. You’re welcome.