As a renowned organizational psychologist and best-selling author, Adam Grant has made a career out of reexamining political, economic, and cultural assumptions about how things should work and people should think.
Most humans suffer from flaws in their logic and reasoning, or what Grant calls the 鈥溾業鈥檓-not-biased bias,鈥 which is the belief that you might have flaws in your thinking, and holes in your reasoning, but I am perfectly rational and neutral and objective.鈥
The challenge is how to dismantle such faulty assumptions, Grant, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told a rapt audience of 160 at the Collis Center in a talk on March 6.
He described an incident in his own teaching career, when a student told him he had a good idea for a start-up company, and did Grant want to invest in it? Grant listened to the pitch and told the student the idea would never work. 鈥淵ou just can鈥檛 sell glasses on the Internet. So I declined the investment. And now Warby Parker is worth over a billion dollars, and my wife is in charge of our investing decisions.鈥
While it was 鈥渙nce true that you could not sell glasses on the Internet, it was now false. I should have been faster to think again,鈥 Grant said.