“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs, 1997
- Do you have tones of creative ideas but don’t know which ones to bet on?
- Do you have a great idea but don’t know how to pitch it?
- Are you running a startup but struggled to build a company culture?
I am sharing my 3 takeaways from the talk Six Ways to be an “Original” by Adam Grant that explores ways of improving effectiveness in different stages of a startup.
1: How to pick your idea effectively?
“When you have a new idea, you should go to your creative peers much more often than you do. Those are the people who will give you the best input.”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
Most new ideas die at the idea selection process. It is due to several layers of bias: people tend to judge their own ideas 20% too positively while leaders and managers tend to judge new ideas too negatively. The 2 main reasons why leaders and managers do so are because:
- They Rely Heavily on Intuition: Leaders and managers often judge new ideas based on their past experiences and conscious or unconscious pattern recognition (prototypes). However, it is not a good basis for judging original ideas because what has worked in the past is not necessarily relevant to what tomorrow is going to look like.
- They have skewed incentives: When managers bet on a bad idea they could loose their career, reputation, or at least be embarrassed in some cases. However, when they reject a good idea, it is often not known by others. Thus, managers who has skewed incentives tend to reject ideas more often since it is a comparably safer choice.
- How to make managers better at judging new ideas? The answer is to make managers brainstorm 5 minutes on an unrelated topic (to avoid falling for their own ideas) before judging other people’s ideas. By doing so, managers are able to enter their creative mindset and become recipient to weird possibilities.
2. How to pitch your idea effectively?
(1) Manage your anxiety instead of calming down
“ Anxiety can be a source of motivation. Sometimes anxiety leads to really creative solutions.”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
Adam Grant interviewed some of the originals (e.g. Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, Larry Page, etc.) and found that they were terrified just like everyone else when they had their big ideas; but they still took actions. Therefore, the question is: Should we calm ourselves down from anxiety?
The answer is no, we should manage our anxieties and there are 2 ways to do so:
- Defensive pessimism describes a person’s tendency to fear failure and experience more anxiety than optimists in a given event. To use it as a strategy is to psych yourself into a mindset where you are convinced to fail; because that will motivate you to work a lot harder and consequently improve your chance of success.
- Say you are excited instead of anxious: Just like anxiety, excitement is a high intensity emotion and involves uncertainty. So instead of slamming on the brakes (calming down); we could more effectively manage anxiety by converting it into excitement, which is a positive emotion.
(2) Master the art of repetition
“ Pitching a new idea is like clapping a song for someone else to guess; however, in this case you wrote the song. ”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
You may spend weeks, months or years thinking about an idea, knowing all the details and the cause and effect of a new concept; however, it makes it difficult to understand how it feels like to learn about it for the first time. And to solve this challenge is to pitch repeatedly. Because on average, it takes 10-20 exposures to a new idea or concept before one starts liking it (aka. the mere-exposure effect).
(3) Make the unfamiliar familiar (build the bridge)
“ The original pitch for the Lion King was “Bambi in Africa with Lions ” which wasn’t accepted for production…whereas when it got reframed as “ Hamlet with Lions”, everyone knew what the story was about and accepted it. ”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
To better communicate a new idea, one needs to build the bridge between the idea and something that has already worked before. While doing so, there are 2 points to bear in mind:
- The familiarity connections may vary by audience; what may sound familiar to one group of audience may not be so for the other.
- Don’t try to build the bridge in the early stage of creative process because it could stifle one’s ability to think outside the box.
(4) Take an honest look at your business
“ These are the 3 reasons you should not invest in my startup. ”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
When we pitch an idea, we often talk about the reasons why it is awesome and the others should invest in it. However, below are a list of benefits to not do so:
- Gain Trust: one may appear to be more trust worthy by admitting the flaws of the business because it shows honesty.
- Obtain Positive Phycological Effect: as it is more difficult for investors to think of more flaws when 3 of them were already being identified; the startup appears to be more attractive. This effect is also known as the availability heuristic theory.
3. How to build a company culture?
(1) Early Stage Startup: Hire cultural fits
As a startup, do you hire people for their skill, future potential (star) or cultural fit? According to the research Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups conducted by two Stanford professors James N. Baron and Michael T. Hannan; out of 200 startups that hired with cultural fit being their highest priority, 0% had failed. In fact, those startups are more likely to IPO.
(2) After IPO: Diversity is key
However, startups that hired according to cultural fits tend to have a slower growth after IPO because people who subscribed to the same values tend to fall in to “groupthink“; making it difficult for those companies to adapt to external changes.
In order to solve this problem, those companies should identify what is missing in its company culture and start bringing in people who contribute to the missing values. In other words, diversity becomes the key to hiring in the later stage of a company.
(3) Accept not only solutions but also problems
“ Collecting problems is a great way to maintain visibility into what’s not working and also what kind of issues demand creativity. ”
Grant, A. (2017). Adam Grant: Six Ways to be an ‘Original’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBMFuqJSYw [Accessed 26 Dec. 2019].
Practices such as collect problems centrally within a company with google doc, review them selectively on a regular basis and pick important ones to fix; or brainstorm internally on how to kill the company are all unconventional ways of gathering potential problems and stimulating creativity.
Conclusion & Book Recommendation
The content of Six Ways to be an “Original” by Adam Grant has given me a structured way of dealing with creativity and also inspired me to reconsider different ways of communication. On top of that, I have learned how successful startups built their company culture while maintaining sustainability. I hope you enjoyed the read as much as I enjoyed creating it! Book recommendation for this video will be Weird Ideas That Works by Robert I. Sutton. Contact me or subscribe 🙂