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At C-Level
Are you an Original? By Michael Krauss
michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com
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s a young consumer products marketing manager I wondered, “How do I keep up with new ideas now that I’m out of school? How do I avoid getting stale? How do I stay original?”
Today, you can read periodicals. You can surf YouTube and Twitter. There’s no dearth of trade publications out there. You can go to trade conferences and share coffee with other marketers. It all helps. For me, when the classroom ended, business books began. As a C-suite executive, I consume almost every business book I can find. So should you, no matter where you are in your career. Wharton professor Adam Grant’s new book, Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World, is exactly the kind of book marketers, trying to hone their skills, should devour. As marketers, we are all trying to move the world in both small and large ways. We strive to identify new, creative paths that will help us achieve our personal and professional ambitions. Originals is a book that provides you with examples, entertains you with insights and instructs you with ideas and concepts. It will make you a more effective individual and executive. Grant’s book examines a suite of diverse “originals,” from Martin Luther King, Jr. in civil rights; to long-forgotten women’s suffrage leader Lucy Stone; to Polaroid founder, Edwin Land; to Apple CEO Steve Jobs; to Segway inventor, Dean Kamen; and CIA analyst Carmen Medina, to mention just a few. We discover how important coalition building is to creating change and how Stone’s relationships with other suffrage leaders and the decisions she made may
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have catalyzed or delayed the results of the women’s suffrage movement. We hear about Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid instant camera and the founder of Polaroid Corporation. Land was a man with a file cabinet of patents and enormous creative capacity. But his inability to change ultimately led to his organization’s demise. We discover why Steve Jobs, an early enthusiast of inventor Dean Kamen’s Segway, could be such an effective original in the technology domain but a poor judge of new transportation technology. We see why Kamen, a prolific inventor, is probably not the fellow you want at the helm of your start-up. For me, the story that was most instructive and profound was the tale Grant tells about Carmen Medina, a young CIA Analyst. In the 1990s, Medina tries, and initially fails, to convince her leadership at the CIA to use web technology for internal sharing of intelligence. Grant describes what any young change agent like Medina must do to persuade her
peers. He shares the alternative strategies you might use and the psychological obstacles you face in selling original ideas as a junior executive. He explains how successful originals “tease apart two major dimensions of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power is about exercising control over others; status is being respected and admired,” Grant writes. Why are passionate, young innovators often not heard, and are instead misunderstood and rebuffed in our corporate organizations? Grant explains, “When people seek to exert influence but lack respect, others perceive them as difficult, coercive and self-serving. Since they haven’t earned our admiration, we don’t feel they have the right to tell us what to do. This is what happened to Carmen Medina.” He goes on to outline how Medina persevered, built her social network, rose within the intelligence community, gained power and status, and ultimately supported two junior analysts when they proposed, “Intellipedia, a classified version of Wikipedia that would be acceptable across the intelligence community.” Like many authors who write about creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, Grant is a fine story teller. He shares tales of how a suite of impactful “originals” succeeded. You learn how Jerry Seinfeld’s show failed in market research and, while on life support, was resurrected by an original-thinking television executive, Rick Ludwin. What gave Ludwin the ability to perceive the value of the Seinfeld opportunity? Grant explains that Ludwin worked outside of the traditional television comedy department in variety and specials. Because he wasn’t
“Conventional wisdom holds that ... some people are born to be leaders, and the rest are followers. Some people can have real impact, but the majority can’t. In Originals Adam shatters all these assumptions.” Sheryl Sandberg
marketing news | May 2016
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marketingmanagement
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boost your originality is to produce more ideas.
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immerse yourself in a new domain. Originality increases when
you broaden your frame of reference.
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Procrastinate strategically.
When you are generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. You are more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate.
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seek more feedback from peers.
It’s hard to judge your own ideas because you tend to be too enthusiastic. Run your pitches by peers. They are poised to spot the potential.
burdened by the conventional rules of the comedy department, he saw the potential of Seinfeld and saved it. While the book’s tales of original success are compelling, Grant gives us more than case examples in his book. He empowers us with an understanding that “originals” are just like you and me. Any of us can be “originals” if we try. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, sums it up in her foreword to the book. “Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts. Some people are born to be leaders, and the rest are followers. Some people can have real impact, but the majority can’t,” Sandberg says. “In Originals Adam shatters all these assumptions.” Grant says the inspiration for writing Originals was twofold. “I worked as a manager for a while before I came into academia. The one time I worked up the courage to speak up I was actually
dragged by my bosses’ boss into the bathroom and basically was threatened that I would be fired if I ever spoke my mind again. I really wanted to know how I could have done that more effectively,” Grant says. “More recently, since my first book, Give and Take, came out, people have been asking, ‘If I am in a culture that is basically toxic, if I’m facing undesirable circumstances, what do I do about that?’ I initially didn’t feel like I had good answers for them. So I started to do some research and here we are.” Grant offers all of us guidance for unleashing our own individual creativity. Among his recommendations, he says:
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Question the default. Instead of
taking the status quo for granted, ask why it exists in the first place.
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triple the number of ideas you generate. The best way to
There are many other small nuggets of in Originals: You learn why even Einstein’s approach to innovation may have been sub-optimal. Not all “originals” make their greatest contributions when they are young. You discover that the web browser you select—Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome—may be a predictor of your own creativity and job success. Non-originals tend to pick the straight forward default option (e.g. Internet Explorer) but originals tend to pick the non-default option (i.e. Firefox or Chrome). You learn that the most successful and original fashion designers not only travel abroad but live abroad in different cultures. Immersion in different cultures can fuel our originality. You find out that birth order may correlate both to success in stealing bases in the major leagues and to originality in business. Firstborns are more likely to follow the default path and less likely to innovate. Personally, I’m glad professor Grant’s wicked boss’s boss took him out of the meeting and chastised him for speaking up when he was a junior employee. It lit a fire and sparked Grant to write a very original book on creativity. Originals provides every executive with a handbook on how to lead if you want to make a difference in your organization and in life. m MiChael krauSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago. May 2016 | MARkETING NEWS
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