Grant examines how people generate and advance novel ideas, arguing against several common beliefs about originality. He argues that original thinkers are not unusual risk-takers, and that many keep stable jobs while pursuing new ventures, which he presents as risk balancing rather than as timidity. He cites research finding that entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had lower failure rates than those who quit.
On idea generation he argues that quality follows from quantity, since the most prolific producers in creative fields also produced the best work, and that people cannot reliably identify their own best ideas. Managers evaluate ideas worse than peers do, and creators overrate their own. He argues for generating many ideas and using peer evaluation to select.
On timing he presents evidence that first movers frequently lose to later entrants who learn from their mistakes, and that procrastination in the middle of a creative task can improve the result by allowing divergent thinking. On advancing ideas he covers the Sarick effect, where leading with the weaknesses of your proposal increases persuasiveness with audiences who have power over you, coalition building among moderates rather than radicals, and the finding that mere exposure makes an unfamiliar idea acceptable after roughly ten to twenty encounters.
His organisational chapters argue for dissent as a requirement rather than a tolerance, using Bridgewater as an example, and against hiring for culture fit. The book is a synthesis of other researchers' work with Grant's framing, and some studies cited have replicated poorly. The examples are chosen to support the argument and the counterexamples are not tested. The material on presenting ideas upward is the most immediately usable.
Operators trying to advance new ideas inside an organisation, and managers who want to know why good proposals are being filtered out.
Organisational psychologist and professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Give and Take presents evidence that people who default to helping others cluster at both the bottom and the top of performance distributions, and identifies what separates the two groups - directly useful for anyone designing incentives or picking partners. Think Again and Originals cover how people revise beliefs against new evidence and how unfamiliar ideas get championed inside established organisations.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.