in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.

Across cultures, there’s a rich body of evidence showing that people continue to hold strong gender-role stereotypes, expecting men to be assertive and women to be communal. When women speak up, they run the risk of violating that gender stereotype, which leads audiences to judge them as aggressive.

Researchers Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully have found that to succeed, originals must often become tempered radicals. They believe in values that depart from traditions and ideas that go against the grain, yet

Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile, one of the world’s foremost authorities on creativity, reminds us that to be successfully original, an invention needs to be new—but it also has to be practical.

it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked.

Across industries, there were three dominant templates: professional, star, and commitment. The professional blueprint emphasized hiring candidates with specific skills: Founders looked for engineers who could code in JavaScript or C++, or scientists who had deep knowledge about synthesizing proteins. In the star blueprint, the focus shifted from c

It’s not just Dalio’s openness that makes people comfortable challenging senior leaders. It’s the fact that early in the training, employees are encouraged to question the principles. Rather than waiting for employees to become experienced, Bridgewater reveals that we can start encouraging originality on day one. In most organizations, the socializ

Google’s people analytics work. We designed a workshop introducing hundreds of employees to the notion that jobs are not static sculptures, but flexible building blocks. We gave them examples of people becoming the architects of their own jobs, customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values—like a

There’s just one tiny problem with the cohesion theory: It isn’t true.