A list of books that tap into talent and creativity(1)

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ ☆☆

Type: Business/Psychological

The people who move the world forward are not those who perfectly adapt to the world as it is, but innovators who challenge and change it. Written by Adam Grant, TED speaker and professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School, Who are innovators? How to innovate?

He lays out a wealth of experimental evidence and draws several sobering conclusions:

Psychologists who have studied the most remarkable people in history and found that many were not exceptionally gifted as children have found, after tracking the lives of child prodigies, that prodigies are no better than their less intellectually precocious peers from similar families. Why is that? Because geniuses are always placed on heavy social expectations, it is easy to become a senior player of the existing rules of the game, few geniuses dare to reform the rules of the game, they become excellent doctors, lawyers, etc., but rarely shake the rigid medical system and unfair legal system. The people who change the world are the sub-elite or the troublemakers in the eyes of teachers.

(2) Innovators are not risk-takers regardless of risk The more successful entrepreneurs, the stronger the risk awareness, to prepare for their multiple paths, such as retaining their day jobs, and multiple business lines of development. Entrepreneurs who keep their day jobs are 33 percent less likely to fail than those who quit their jobs. Google's Larry Page, Apple's Steve Wozniak, and eBay's Pierre Omidyar have all done so. In general, entrepreneurs are more cautious than the average person.

(3) Quantity is the basis of quality Many people mistakenly believe that the amount of creation does not matter, quality is important, and even think that quantity and quality conflict with each other. However, you can only produce quality work if you create a lot of it. Research has found that creative geniuses are no better quality in their fields than their peers, they just produce more work and therefore have more opportunities. Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Picasso were prolific creators, and their most powerful works appeared in the most productive period.

(4) Experience will hinder innovation The more professional knowledge in a field and the longer work experience, the easier it is to rigid thinking and unable to adapt to new rules. Whether in sports or financial accounting, older and more experienced people are less able to adapt to new rules and perform less well than newcomers. Moreover, the most creative people, once in a management position, will become rigid and conservative. Innovation often comes from new blood from the outside.

(5) Middle management stifles innovation The bottom and top of the organization are open to fresh ideas because the bottom has nothing to lose, the top likes to be different, but middle management is the most insecure. The innovative ideas of grassroots employees are always stifled by middle managers because middle managers are afraid of change, innovation is a risk, and there is no historical data case reference, which poses a threat to the stability of middle managers' positions and performance. To make an idea a reality, for the good of both the organization and the individual, innovators can either bypass middle management and join the top and bottom to push their idea forward, or jump ship or start a new business and start something else on their own. In the 1990s, an employee of the CIA proposed the establishment of an intelligence community website but was denied by her superiors. In the case of nowhere to change jobs in the closed industry, she changed her position, won the support of senior and grassroots level several years later, launched the website, and gained peer recognition; Former Apple sales chief Donna Dubinsky, who disagreed with Jobs over inventory management, quit to become CEO of Palm, a smartphone company, and later disagreed with management to found Numenta, a machine-intelligence company.

Procrastination is often stigmatized by society, but when it comes to creative work, it is procrastination that leads to good work. Research by Grant's doctoral student Jihae Shi found that procrastinators are significantly more creative than fast performers. Da Vinci's process of creating the Mona Lisa is really a delay, painting a few strokes, and tossing anatomy, and perspective, it a work that has not been completed for more than ten years, but it is half-hearted, just make his works become a legend of The Times. When you receive a creative task, put it in the back of your mind, do some other activity, and then come back to it to complete it bit by bit.

Many people mistakenly believe that being the first to eat crabs is easier to achieve commercial success and occupy the blank market, but the failure rate of pioneers (47%) is much higher than that of latecomers (8%), and the market share occupied by pioneers (10%) is much smaller than that of latecomers (28%) because the first to eat crabs are ahead of The Times. Unable to obtain the corresponding market and support. When it comes to patented technologies or products based on population effects, the first-mover advantage does exist, but in most cases, especially when the market is not yet developed, the success rate of the first to eat the crab is not high, and the later imitators are more advantageous.

Average children are always faced with specific rules set by their parents (schedule, bedtime, etc.), while creative children have one or no rules on average; The more parents who do not give any reason and force their children to follow discipline, the more likely they are to raise delinquent teenagers. When parents cultivate their child's creativity, it is best not to set specific rules, but to explain the truth and values, which will not limit his understanding and imagination. Psychologists have found that German parents who went against the mainstream to rescue suffering Jews during the Holocaust raised their children differently from the general public, treating them as rational individuals who explained the logic, moral principles, and values rather than specific disciplines. Therefore, enlightened parents are more likely to raise excellent children. (9) Organizations that respect dissent are more creative. Most organization managers emphasize unity and unity, thus improving the efficiency of enterprise operations. However, group thinking is prone to cause disaster in decision-making. Yale University psychologist Irving Janis has found that groupthink is to blame for many U.S. foreign policy disasters, such as the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. Grant stresses that managers should foster innovation by encouraging dissent. Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that minority opinions, even if wrong, can improve business decisions. A cohesive culture helps start-ups expand, but for mature companies that go public, it can be counterproductive, hindering later growth. The Bridgewater hedge fund, for example, has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history, thanks to a management culture led by its boss, Ray Dalio, that prevents groupthink by requiring employees to disagree, even allowing them to point out his mistakes directly, and confounding them in his critical emails. All in all, if you're an idea-rich, creative person who wants to change the world with your ideas, check out this book. Adam Grant's prose is so fluent that it strikes the perfect balance between scholarly and accessible, and the book was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2017.