Adam Grant Quotes
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Power frees us from the chains of conformity.
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If we want girls to receive positive reinforcement for early acts of leadership, let's discourage bossy behavior along with banning bossy labels. That means teaching girls to engage in behaviors that earn admiration before they assert their authority.
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To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.
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Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.
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If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
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I can't tell you that if you bring in a bunch of weird and different people, then a bunch of good things will happen. But I can tell you that if you hire a bunch of similar people and promote only the ones who are most similar, a bunch of bad things are likely to happen.
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When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position, and salary is important, there's another consideration that matters just as much: culture.
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I'm not a fan of being inauthentic.
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Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.
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Successful givers secure their oxygen masks before coming to the assistance of others. Although their motives may be less purely altruistic, their actions prove more altruistic, because they give more.
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Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
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To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.
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Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.
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One of the signs of a bad coworker is a pattern of persistent undermining - intentionally hindering a colleague's success, reputation, or relationships.
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The culture of a workplace - an organization's values, norms and practices - has a huge impact on our happiness and success.
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For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.
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Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.
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You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.
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In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry - people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.
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When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.
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To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.
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Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.
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I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
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Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.