Quotes from Adam Grant

Power frees us from the chains of conformity.

In the eyes of many people, giving doesn't count unless it's completely selfless. In reality, though, giving isn't sustainable when it's completely selfless.

When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust.

When medical students focus on helping others, they're able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.

A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.

Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they're less defensive about it.

Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.

Perhaps gaining power doesn't cause people to act like takers. It simply creates the opportunity for people who think like takers to express themselves.

When takers talk about mistakes, they're usually quick to place the blame on other people. Givers are more likely to say 'Here's the mistake I made; I learned the following from it. Here are the steps I'm taking to make sure I don't let people down in the future.'

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.

Conformity is dangerous.

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.

People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.

In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.

I spend a lot of my time trying to help leaders build cultures of productive givers.

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.

The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.

I'm not a fan of being inauthentic.

We all have original ideas. Even if we don't see ourselves as supercreative or as wild nonconformists, we have insights every day about how the world around us could be better. It might be a better way of running meetings in your office that would be less mind-numbing. It might be a little twist on a product or a service.

Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.

Focus attention and energy on making a difference in the lives of others, and success might follow as a by-product.

The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.

It's true that every leader needs followers. We can't all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous - especially for an entity in formation.

As a man, it is true that I will never know what it is like to be a woman. As an organizational psychologist, though, I feel a responsibility to bring evidence to bear on dynamics of work life that affect all of us, not only half of us.