Adam Grant is a social scientist who has studied people who are famous for being original innovators and summarizes his finding in this fairly interesting and readable offering. Grant supports his main observations with both case studies and research results. I was impressed with how often he referred to different studies. He seems to have done a fairly extensive survey of the research in this area. His examples about well known companies and individuals make the book engaging. I thought he had some fascinating observations, but sometimes I wondered about his I conclusions. I think he was too quick to apply principles shown in a small study in much larger applications. For example, they might have a group of people in a study and they told one group to think of one thought for a few minutes before they did a task, and another group thought another thing for 2 minutes before they did a task and then they would conclude, "group one generated 16 percent more original ideas than the other group." So question one is, "how to you rate how original an idea is?" Question two is, "how could this possibly relate to what happens in a real corporate setting?"
Beside that objection, I found the book quite interesting and stimulating. Some of the ideas dovetailed nicely with principles from both Smart Trust, and another book I am reading with my husband called, Awakening Joy. I think if I were the kind to read lots of self-help books, I would begin to trust ideas that seem to appear in many sources. (322 p.)
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