The creative power of misfits WorkLife with Adam Grant Audio only
Translator: Ivana Korom
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
Adam Grant: What’s your favorite movie?
Kid 1: One of them is “Wreck-It Ralph.”
AG: And another?
Kid 1: “Mr. Peabody and Sherman.”
AG: My kids have seen a lot of cartoons.
Kids: A lot.
(Laughter)
Kid 2: On the TV and in the movie theater.
AG: My wife and I
love animated films, too.
When we were growing up,
there was only one name
in animated movies –
(Music)
Disney.
For about six decades, they were
pretty much the only game in town.
By the mid-90s, Disney films
had started to follow a formula.
They would take an old story,
add a few musical numbers and – voilà! –
“Pocahontas,” “Hercules,” “Mulan.”
But then, something new
happened in animation.
(Audio clip, “Toy Story”)
To infinity and beyond!
AG: Pixar reinvented how you make
an animated movie.
Instead of drawing characters,
you code them on a computer,
which makes them come alive in 3-D
instead of being flat and two-dimensional.
I’m sure you remember Pixar’s
first computer-animated movie,
“Toy Story.”
(Clip, “Toy Story”)
There’s a snake in my boot!
AG: It was a smash.
Not just because the tech was cool,
but also because the story was fresh.
Brad Bird: It was just so vivid and funny,
and the characters were original.
AG: This is Brad Bird.
He’s a writer, animator and director.
BB: They weren’t doing the 10 songs
and all that stuff that was getting
very standard in animation at the time.
AG: Pixar’s first three films
got multiple Oscar nominations.
They grossed over a billion dollars.
The studio was a perfectly
calibrated hit machine.
And that’s when they made
a strange decision:
they hired Brad.
He was coming off
a big project that tanked.
BB: “Don’t make me go back there, man!
Don’t make me go back!”
AG: And it wasn’t his first failure.
BB: I got fired from Disney,
and I was actually fired from two
of the first three jobs I held.
AG: But Pixar saw promise in Brad.
He came to the studio
with a bold vision for a new film.
And he didn’t recruit the star teams
who had created their earlier hits.
Instead, he deliberately assembled
a band of Pixar’s biggest misfits.
BB: Black sheep.
John Walker: Disgruntled.
Nicole Paradis Grindle: I say, “pirate.”
AG: Doesn’t exactly sound
like a dream team.
But somehow, the movie they made together
grossed over 600 million dollars,
won two Oscars
and was Pixar’s biggest hit yet.
It was … incredible.
(Multiple voices) Incredible.
Incredible. Incredible.
AG: The critics loved it
almost as much as my kids did.
(Screaming) Kids: Awesome!
Kid 2: I want to see it again!
Kid 1: Me, too.
Kids: Again! Again! Again!
(Theme music)
AG: I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife,
my podcast with TED.
I’m an organizational psychologist.
I study how to make work not suck.
In this show,
I’m inviting myself inside the minds
of some truly unusual people,
because they’ve mastered something
I wish everyone knew about work.
Today: shake-ups, and the value
of the outsiders inside your workplace.
Thanks to Bonobos
for sponsoring this episode.
What’s the best time to shake things up?
In most workplaces, it happens
when you’re struggling.
When the chips are down, you’re desperate,
and you have nothing to lose
by taking some risks.
But by then, it’s often too late.
You don’t have the resources
to run bold experiments.
The evidence suggests
that the best time to shake things up
is actually when you’re doing well.
That’s when you have the time,
energy and freedom to innovate.
But sadly, research shows
that success often makes us complacent.
Experts call it the “fat cat syndrome.”
Think about a time when you’ve been
at the top of your game.
Did you really want to embrace
something radically different?
Of course not.
You probably became
overconfident in your recipe
and resistant to try new things.
Take Blockbuster Video.
At one point, they were apparently
opening a new store every 17 hours.
So they didn’t see any reason to buy
a little mail-order company
called “Netflix.”
Oops!
One day, the CEO of a successful company
gave me that line I hate:
“But that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
My answer?
“Blockbuster. BlackBerry.
Polaroid. Toys ‘R’ Us.
Do you want me to keep going?”
So how do you shake things up
before it’s too late?
For that, we’re going to the movies.
(Music)
In 1999, Warner Brothers
released the first animated movie
directed by Brad Bird:
“Iron Giant.”
John Walker: I remember being
so excited about it.
AG: This is Brad’s producer, John Walker.
It was the first big project
for both Brad and John.
On opening day, John went to see it
in a big theater in Times Square.
JW: And there were three people in there.
And I went, “What the heck is going on?”
So I spent the rest of the day just
hanging around in front of the marquee
and whenever anybody would come by
and look at the poster,
I’d go, “It’s a really good movie.
I’ll buy your tickets.”
(Laughs)
I probably bought, like,
10 people tickets to see it,
because there was no one
in the theaters, it was empty.
Empty.
It was just sad.
AG: Ouch.
JW: So I thought, that’s it,
that’s the end of me,
I’ll have “The Iron Giant”
on my resume and nothing more.
AG: The film failed commercially.
But it was wildly original.
And the leaders at Pixar
saw potential there.
So Brad Bird and John Walker got the call
from two of the studio’s cofounders,
Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs.
JW: They go, you know,
“We’ll bring this bacteria in
from the outside
and see if it grows
in the petri dish,” you know.
BB: They were actively choosing
a guy to come up
who had just made a big flop.
AG: Pixar was founded
on a disruptive vision.
Their leaders fervently believed
it was never too early
to throw your own recipe out the window.
Steve Jobs wanted to keep raising the bar:
bigger hits, longer run times.
So he picked a couple of outsiders
to drive a shake-up.
BB: They were feeling like, “We’re
in danger of falling into certain habits,
because we have the same group
that are doing things.
And we’re very proud of this group,
and this group is very talented.
But we want to shake things up.”
And they felt like
whatever I was going to do,
it was going to be different.
JW: And so they said, “OK, well, here.
Can you guys do it?
Can you do it in half the time,
half the money?”
AG: They gave the answer
you’d probably give
if Steve Jobs had asked you that question.
JW: Well, sure we can!
(Laughter)
You know? You just say you can, right?
And then you try to go
figure out how to do it.
AG: So Pixar hired
John Walker and Brad Bird.
Brad had been working on a new story
for an animated film.
It would be called “The Incredibles.”
And it was different
than anything Pixar had ever done.
BB: Everything that the film was,
was all the things that CG animation
was then terrible at.
It was full of humans, which,
they were the weakest thing
in CG animation,
if you look at humans circa that time.
AG: Pixar films had only had humans
as minor characters.
And they didn’t look very convincing.
To date, Pixar’s movies
were mostly filled with toys,
monsters and talking bugs.
Now, Brad was pitching a movie
that would require animating
a whole family of not just humans,
humans with superpowers.
BB: It was full of water and fire and wind
and all this stuff that CG animation
was no good at doing.
Hair.
AG: It turns out, hair was a real problem.
Prior to “The Incredibles,” no one had
even bothered to code long hair,
because it was just impossible
in CG animation.
BB: It’s almost like everybody used a ton
of hair spray before they got filmed,
because the hair doesn’t move much.
And, you know, we were doing a film
where it was part of Violet’s character.
AG: Violet is a member
of the Incredibles family –
a shy, moody teenager.
(Clip, “The Incredibles”) Violet: Normal?
What do you know about normal?
What does anyone in this family
know about normal?
AG: She was supposed to spend
a huge part of the film
covering her face
with her long, black hair.
JW: We’d seen these beautiful tests.
AG: Producer John Walker.
JW: And it was like,
wow, she’s shaking her head,
and the hair is flowing,
and it’s gorgeous,
and it’s going to be beautiful.
AG: But the tests were oversimplified.
The hair moved right,
but kind of looked like strips of rubber.
When it was time to do
the full computer animation,
Violet’s hair looked awful.
So John asked what it would take
to get it right.
And he was shocked at the answer.
JW: “We can’t actually
do the movie like that.
That would take 10 years
and 10 million dollars.”
I was like, “Then why
did you show us that?”
I’m trying to get myself ready
to go tell Brad that we’re
going to cut Violet’s hair.
BB: “You can’t do it!
That’s the character.
She’s got to have the hair!”
As the film goes on, she feels enough
growing self-assurance
that she pulls the hair out of her face.
Her hair had a story arc.
(Laughter)
AG: To do hair and water
and all these other new images correctly,
Pixar execs guessed that the film
could cost half a billion dollars
and take a decade to make.
Brad needed some original thinking.
So this unconventional director
went looking for a team
of unconventional recruits –
the outsiders among Pixar’s insiders.
The black sheep.
BB: They are not always the, um,
smiling-est, easiest people to work with.
Sometimes, they’re a little grumpy.
AG: Brad, have you ever been
a black sheep yourself?
BB: Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
My family was kind of like
the family in “The Incredibles.”
We had these dinners
where everybody vented
and said what they thought.
That’s the attitude
that I kind of grew up in.
And I found very quickly,
the world doesn’t work that way.
AG: Brad searched Pixar’s ranks
for people who were frustrated
with the status quo,
people who had risky ideas
that had been dismissed or overlooked.
You might have one
of those people on your team.
Or maybe you’re the black sheep.
BB: There’s a big impetus,
especially with success,
to repeat whatever has worked before.
You know? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But I was looking for a bunch of people
that were kind of dissatisfied
with the way things were.
AG: Turns out, Brad was onto something.
Research shows that the kind
of frustration he harnessed
can fuel creativity.
In other words,
the curmudgeons on your team
could be great untapped resources.
I’m sure you’ve seen companies
hire external consultants or executives
to shake things up.
But there’s evidence that you
don’t have to turn to outside hires.
You can go to the black sheep
already working within the company.
Consider one study
that was done at a company
that makes oil drilling equipment.
Supervisors evaluated how often employees
brought new and innovative ideas
to the table.
The employees who were rated
the most creative
were the ones who felt
dissatisfied with their jobs.
Their frustration with problems
motivated them to develop fresh solutions.
But dissatisfaction
didn’t always lead to creativity.
It only helped when people felt
committed to the company
and had access to the feedback
and support they needed.
When you ignore them, disgruntled
people channel their frustration
in unproductive or even
counterproductive directions.
If you’re aware they’re out there, though,
and you really listen to them,
they can become your allies.
Lisa Bodell: They always say,
“Innovation is the pirate ship
that sails into the yacht club.”
Nobody likes it, but
they appreciate it later.
AG: This is Lisa Bodell.
She spent part of her career
in advertising and start-ups.
LB: I came there to do really great,
motivating and inspiring things,
and I was spending my day just managing
processes and procedures and crap.
AG: Lisa got fed up with the dozens
of meaningless tasks
that define so many work environments.
So she started a company
called FutureThink
to help organizations
shake up the status quo.
(Clip) LB: … and ideally,
walk away with things
that will help you simplify
your work and your life
to get you moving forward.
And what I thought we could do
is go through about – I don’t know,
500 PowerPoint slides.
Does that work for you all? (Laughter)
No?
AG: Her big breakthrough came
when she was giving a talk
to a few dozen executives
at a manufacturing company.
LB: I realized quickly that
these people didn’t give a crap
about what I was talking about.
And so I called a break,
and I said, “Listen,
I’m going to shake things up.”
AG: She looked at all these
bored executives,
and told them to kill their own company.
LB: I challenged each of those groups
to identify who their number one
competitor was.
And then I said, “Pretend
you’re that competition.
Pretend you have that hat on.
I want you to put yourself
out of business.”
I mean – the room lit on fire.
They were so excited,
because I gave them permission
to talk about the things
that were literally verboten.
It was a mindset shift
as well as a business strategy shift.
AG: When I heard about the exercise,
I was expecting a roomful
of complaints and cynicism.
Then I watched it happen.
And I have never seen a more energized
group of leaders in my life.
LB: Really what it does is give people
a framework and permission
to start attacking things
that aren’t working.
And that’s what’s energizing to people.
They don’t know the difference, Adam,
between being in a groove
and being in a rut.
And most people, when you talk about
complacency, are in a rut.
And until you talk to them about,
“What do you wish you could change?
Why are you frustrated?”
they get pumped up.
AG: One thing that’s always
fascinated me about this exercise
is how different it would be
if you ran it as “save the company.”
And I was interested in hearing
what led you to the boldness
of killing the company
rather than saving the company.
LB: Save means “safe” and “preserve.”
You know? I think of a life preserver.
“How can we keep what we have safe?”
versus “How can we get rid
of what we have and do things better?”
It’s permission to admit
that things might not be right,
so you can look at what’s not working
and make space for things that are.
AG: If you were asked
to kill your company,
where would you start?
You might begin the way Lisa does:
gather some people together
to give their frustration a voice.
Put them on offense, not defense,
by asking them to attack
the problems they see.
And then invite them to run
with their best ideas.
Lisa’s approach has worked
in all kinds of environments:
banks, tech companies,
city governments, schools.
And Brad Bird did his own
version of it at Pixar.
BB: Pixar kind of invented
a lot of the stuff
that now everyone takes for granted.
I mean, they were the best
in the world at it.
Those methods weren’t
going to work for our film.
AG: Brad challenged the black sheep
to try different solutions
to their toughest animation problems,
like Violet’s hair.
BB: They don’t want to do something
the way that it’s always been done.
For every 20 people that say,
“This is how you do it,”
there’s usually one person going,
“Uh, you don’t have to do it that way.
There’s another way that you could do it.”
AG: But there was one problem that neither
Brad nor John Walker had anticipated.
JW: They were in different rooms,
they were doing different things.
AG: The technical people had been
unleashed to build all these new tools.
But the creative people
didn’t really understand how to use them.
JW: Something would go wrong,
an email would come from one side, going,
“Hey, your simulator is broken,”
over to the people
that were building the simulator.
And the simulator guys would write back,
“No, no, no, no – it’s operator error.”
And they would go
back and forth like that.
And we’d go, “Oh, gosh.
This is not working.”
AG: Brad and John started listening
to the people on the front lines.
And they suddenly realized
there was a simple solution
to their complex problem:
put the technical people together
with the animators in the same rooms.
JW: As soon as that started
to happen, it was like magic,
because somebody would
show them the problem and say,
“Look what happens – I do this,
and the hair flies around the room.”
And the guy building the simulator goes,
“Well, you’ve got to hit F3-7 and put
this little bit of the code in there.
Didn’t you know that?”
And they go, “No, we didn’t know that!”
Beautiful thing when you go
after black sheep, you say,
“Hey, I’ll give your crazy idea a try.”
That’s kind of where they want to go.
AG: So wait, Brad –
does that mean you’re just trying
to surround yourself constantly
with angry people?
BB: No, I mean, I don’t want
just disgruntled people.
There’s plenty of those,
and they don’t do
a damn thing for anybody.
I want people who are disgruntled
because they have
a better way of doing things
and they are having trouble
finding an avenue –
racing cars that are just
spinning their wheels in a garage
rather than racing.
You open that garage, and man,
those people will take you somewhere.
(Theme music)
AG: So you’ve got your team
of dissatisfied people.
You’re ready for them to shake things up.
Now, how do you get them all
innovating in the same direction?
More on that after the break.
(Theme music)
OK, this is going to be
a different kind of ad.
I’ve played a personal role in selecting
the sponsors for this podcast,
because they all have
interesting cultures of their own.
Today, we’re going inside
the workplace at Bonobos.
A few years ago, Sam Gonzalez
was on an all-staff call at Bonobos,
when the top boss said something
that took his breath away.
Sam Gonzalez: She had said,
one of the things in that conference call
was that we were going to embrace,
in our marketing campaigns, we were going
to start to think about gender identity.
AG: For Sam, a guide
in one of Bonobos’s shops,
the idea that a men’s clothing brand
was going to focus on gender identity
wasn’t just exciting;
it was personal.
SG: I’d worked at Bonobos
for a little over a year
before I figured out that I am trans
and I want to transition.
And that will include for me
letting everyone that I work with know
and everyone who comes into my life know
that this is a part of who I am.
AG: Sam had prepared for the worst.
SG: What does it mean
to transition at work?
Because I had only heard horror stories.
But then, once I did,
I was proved 100 percent wrong.
People were super open,
they were incredibly caring
and respectful.
AG: And then, just a few months later,
Sam found himself on this
all-hands phone call.
Micky Onvural, then the copresident
and now Bonobos CEO,
said the company was going to start
a public conversation
about gender identity.
As soon as the call finished,
Sam sent her an email.
SG: I said, “I don’t know
if you know this, but I am trans,
and I have transitioned at Bonobos,
and I’ve been here for a while.
And you have no idea
what this type of representation
means to someone like me.”
Micky Onvural: When I first
got Sam’s email,
I was, to be honest,
completely overwhelmed.
I think I probably shed a tear or two.
I’m Micky Onvural,
I am the CEO of Bonobos.
For me, it was very touching
that someone felt comfortable enough
to be able to tell me that personal story.
AG: Think about how rare that is,
for a junior employee to feel comfortable
emailing someone that high up.
I almost never see it,
even though I spend a lot of time
encouraging senior leaders to be open.
At Bonobos, Micky wasn’t just receptive
to new ideas from below,
she actively encouraged them.
SG: … and I had talked
a little bit about, in my email,
that I had met Chris Mosier,
and I think that he would be
a fantastic person for us to highlight.
MO: The first thing I did,
I forwarded it on to our production team,
and I said, “Sam’s just had
this amazing idea
of us bringing Chris Mosier in
and shooting him in our clothes.
Let’s do it.”
AG: Chris Mosier was part of the American
men’s duathlon team in 2016.
That made him the first openly transgender
athlete to compete for Team USA.
SG: Chris was one
of the first people that I saw
that made me feel like
being trans is a thing,
and you can do it, and you can
transition and you can be happy.
AG: So Sam made a pitch for Bonobos
to feature Chris in a commercial.
Chris Mosier: For a men’s
clothing company to say,
trans men are men
and can be a part of our campaign,
to me, personally, was a big deal.
AG: That’s Chris.
A few months later, Bonobos launched
a commercial that featured him.
CM: It was sort of what
I was searching for when I was younger.
Like, if I would have seen out trans men
being a part of men’s campaigns,
being a part of men’s fashion magazines
or commercials on TV,
that are talking about
men and masculinity,
I think that my trajectory would have been
drastically different as a person.
AG: So, Sam, as you reflect
on this whole experience
of first transitioning at work and then
bringing on Chris as a spokesperson,
how does that make you feel?
SG: There’s not really
a word to describe it.
I think “awesome” is too small of a word.
AG: Awesome is too small a word.
I like that.
And I like the idea that big ideas
can come from anywhere in a company,
as long as there’s support at the top.
Bonobos makes great clothes
that can fit every guy.
Ordering on their website
is easy, they ship fast,
and if it doesn’t fit, they want to know.
Visit bonobos.com, enter
promo code TED at checkout,
and get 20 percent off your first order.
That’s bonobos.com and promo code TED
for 20 percent off.
(Music)
When you’re gathering a group of people
for a major shake-up,
how do you motivate them?
Your first instinct is probably
to inspire them.
(Clip, “Apollo 13”) We never lost
an American in space,
we’re sure as hell not gonna lose
one on my watch.
Failure is not an option!
(Clip, “The Golden Age”)
Let them come with the armies of hell!
They will not pass! (Cheers)
(Clip, “The Waterboy”) You can do it!
AG: If you’re working with a bunch
of disgruntled black sheep,
you’ll feel especially compelled
to convey confidence,
show enthusiasm
and make sure they don’t get discouraged
by the sheer difficulty of the task.
But if you’re Brad Bird
and you’re making “The Incredibles,”
you do the exact opposite.
Brad told his team no one thought
they could pull it off.
Nicole Paradis Grindle: That’s the kind
of challenge that lights a fuse in Brad.
And that’s how he leads our teams.
AG: This is Nicole Paradis Grindle.
She’s been a producer
at Pixar since the mid-90s.
When Nicole joined “The Incredibles” team,
they’d been struggling
with the animation for about a year.
NPG: I was working with the engineers
who were trying to figure out
how to do the hair and the cloth.
And they were saying it was impossible,
Brad was asking for too much …
And they just kept saying,
“Nope, nope, nope, we can’t do it.”
They were trying, and the stuff
they were producing looked terrible.
We have these crew meetings once a week,
so everyone’s wandering in first thing
in the morning with their coffee,
piling into this big theater that we have.
And he gets up in front
of this room of people,
and he just starts yelling
and telling them,
“They think we can’t do this!
They think we’re too slow,
they think we’re not good enough!
I’m telling you, we’re going to do this!”
You know? And people love it –
I mean, it’s this pep rally.
AG: What Brad did by instinct
is actually backed by evidence.
If you want to motivate black sheep,
give them a battle to fight,
a particular kind of battle.
BB: One thing that is very effective
is to find a common enemy.
But the enemy doesn’t have to be a person.
It can be a mindset.
It can be a presumption.
It can be a system
that doesn’t want to change.
It can even be something
like a trend in movies
that is just making movies stupider.
You can make that the enemy.
And you can put it up
in front of people and say,
“You know what I don’t like?
I don’t like X.
And here’s how I think we can
not do this thing that everyone is doing
and really dazzle the audience.”
And people like that,
because you’re putting them
on the pirate ship.
You’re not going with
the well-funded, safe routes.
You’re kind of striking
your sails in a storm.
And you’re OK with it.
That fires people up, you know?
It fires me up.
Samir Nurmohamed:
It sounds like in that moment,
Brad was shaping how his team
perceived those outside of their team
and basically framed those individuals
as critics or naysayers.
AG: This is Samir Nurmohamed,
my colleague at Wharton.
He studies what happens
when we’re cast in the role of underdog.
SN: Stories of underdogs and favorites
permeate societies:
David versus Goliath, Horatio Alger,
Ivan the Fool in Russian literature.
You see these examples of underdogs
going from rags to riches
or performing against
others' low expectations,
across the world.
AG: An underdog isn’t a kind of person.
It’s a mindset that can help
you approach problems
the way black sheep do.
You can position people as underdogs
by telling them they’re not
expected to succeed.
And surprisingly,
the uphill battle is often the one
that people are most excited to fight.
In a study with job seekers who had
faced discrimination in their careers,
Samir randomly assigned
some of them to tell a story
about how they had been underdogs
against the odds.
It almost doubled their chances
of landing a job in the following month.
SN: You actually experience more efficacy
and more confidence to do well,
and it leads to higher performance.
AG: In another study,
Samir had people fill out a survey
about their negotiating style.
Then he told them that,
based on their results,
he had calculated the probability
of their success in a negotiation.
He told some participants
they were the favorites;
some, they were evenly matched;
and told others
that they were the underdogs.
SN: The underdog actually ended up
reaching the more creative solution.
People who were told
that they couldn’t succeed
actually ended up performing better.
And the reason for this
is that they essentially wanted
to prove the researchers wrong.
AG: The favorites had nothing
to prove. They got complacent.
The underdogs were driven to show
they had been misjudged,
which happens in all kinds of jobs.
Even Michael Jordan
motivated himself this way.
SN: Even in his Hall of Fame
induction speech,
when the world came out
to celebrate with him,
he was calling out his school coach
who chose another player over him
and how this fueled his motivation
to prove them wrong.
What’s remarkable is that Jordan
was talking about being underestimated
after being universally recognized as not
only the greatest basketball player ever,
but as one of the greatest
athletes of all time.
Jordan was still constructing
that perception of being underestimated
and using that as motivation
to prove others wrong.
AG: But before you start
cutting down all your colleagues
in the name of motivation,
keep in mind that there’s
a wrong way to do it.
SN: This doesn’t mean
you go around the workplace
telling everyone that they can’t succeed.
That’s not the way
to instill this motivation.
As a person in this position
who’s seen as an underdog,
you have to feel like
you have the capabilities to succeed.
AG: For the underdog approach to work,
the low expectations need to come
from the right messenger,
a natural adversary.
SN: When a really credible person
tells you you can’t succeed,
in some sense, you basically internalize
those expectations, your confidence drops,
you actually believe them,
and you don’t perform as successfully.
On the other hand,
when you receive low expectations
from someone who’s not seen as credible,
you perceive them as really incompetent
or not knowledgeable
about either the domain
that you’re performing in
or your own abilities.
This is what sparks that desire
to prove others wrong.
AG: So if you’re rallying salespeople,
you can emphasize that R&D doesn’t think
they can hit their targets.
And if you’re trying to motivate
technical or creative people,
you can tell them they’re being
doubted by a bunch of suits.
NPG: That’s what those black sheep
probably are looking for,
is an opportunity to show
what they can do.
AG: Pixar producer Nicole Grindle
saw Brad’s underdog gambit pay off.
The black sheep at the studio felt
the naysayers had no business
judging their abilities –
or the new animation techniques
they were about to invent.
NPG: The idea that
we’re proving folks wrong,
I think, is the prime motivator.
I mean, of course, we want to make
a great film and a great story,
and that’s a given.
But proving that, you know,
proving to the man that we’re better
than they think we are –
that’s exciting.
And that’s what folks
in this industry live to do,
is, you know, act in that kind of a story.
(Laughs)
AG: The last step
for energizing your shake-up team
is to calibrate the degree of difficulty.
How challenging should the goal be?
BB: I think you always have
the impossible task,
because basically,
to do really good work is hard.
And if you’re doing it right,
you are kind of an underdog.
You should be shooting
for something that’s out of reach.
And maybe you don’t hit it,
but at the end of it,
if you are reaching for something
that’s beyond your reach,
you’re probably going to extend
your reach from your previous work.
AG: In psychology,
we call that kind of reach
a “just-manageable difficulty.”
It’s a challenge that tests
and stretches your skills
to the very edge
of what you think is possible.
It has to be tough,
but it can’t set you up
for certain failure, either.
As Pixar producer John Walker puts it:
JW: Sometimes you have to swim upstream.
Sometimes, you have to swim upstream.
But if you swim upstream too long,
something is probably wrong.
(Music)
AG: OK, I came away from Pixar
convinced that to shake things up,
it can help to recruit the people
you’d least expect – frustrated people –
and listen to them.
Then motivate them
by making them into underdogs,
against the odds or a difficult enemy.
But I was curious about
whether this could all work
in a place that’s
the total opposite of Pixar:
the ultimate bureaucracy,
an environment where
strict orders are followed,
old traditions crush new technologies,
and creativity isn’t just not rewarded,
it’s sometimes actively punished.
(Clip) Recruit training,
where a man is taught
the basic skills for the sea.
AG: The US Navy.
(Clip, old recruitment ad)
He learns to be part of the team.
He learns where he might fit in.
AG: A few years ago,
a military general told me
that if I wanted to understand
innovation in the armed forces,
I had to talk to a junior naval officer
named Ben Kohlmann.
Ben Kohlmann: My grandfather
was a World War II aviator,
and my great uncle was an Air Force pilot
who was shot down over Vietnam
and spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton
with John McCain and Jim Stockdale.
And those stories infused my upbringing.
And I wanted to be leading
carrier battle fleets
against whoever was attacking
the United States.
AG: So I was surprised to hear
Ben’s colleagues call him a black sheep,
a rabble-rouser,
a troublemaker.
BK: “Troublemaker”
is an amusing term for me,
and I think my parents
would get a kick out of that.
AG: Do you think you are one, though?
Or you became one in the Navy?
BK: I think I became a troublemaker
in the sense of challenging
established wisdom.
AG: Ben may have been a sailor,
but he didn’t start out as a pirate.
BK: I was in a fraternity
that was known for its parties
but was the guy doing
risk management on the outside,
making sure nothing too crazy went down.
AG: Ben became a naval aviator,
just like the pilots in “Top Gun.”
(Music from “Top Gun”)
Their call signs were
“Maverick” and “Iceman.”
BK: My call sign was “Professor,”
because I had this habit
of reading long books
like “The American History of Law”
and listening to classical music.
AG: When Ben flew missions
as a naval pilot,
he had a huge amount of autonomy.
BK: Being a 27-year-old who’s leading
two $65 million jets
with, you know, 400- or 500-pound bombs,
this is an incredible amount
of responsibility on a daily basis.
You were the on-scene commander.
AG: But when Ben came back
from overseas deployment,
he started getting frustrated –
frustrated that people
were getting rewarded
based on seniority instead of performance,
frustrated that people
were getting promoted for conformity
instead of original thinking,
frustrated that
a field-tested combat pilot
couldn’t even have
a beer on a Friday night
without seeking approval
from a senior commander.
BK: You know, there’s
five or six levels of approval.
Even if the first four people say yes,
it only takes one veto to kill an idea.
And so that becomes very discouraging,
and you stop caring to some extent.
AG: So Ben wrote an essay
for a military news site.
He explained his frustration
and challenged the Navy to start
supporting and promoting junior people
with disruptive ideas.
Piping up like that
is sort of not done in the military.
BK: And I said some pretty
intemperate things,
if I’m reflecting on it.
But it got the attention
of a lot of senior officials
who were aghast that I would write
something like this.
AG: But some leaders
were open to Ben’s perspective.
A Navy admiral was setting up something
called a “rapid innovation cell.”
And he asked Ben to direct it.
Now, to give you a sense for how slowly
the Navy adopts new technologies,
some of their computers
are still running Windows 95.
(Windows 95 “Ta-da!” sound)
Yet, over the next year,
Ben’s rapid innovation cell
succeeded in getting 3-D printers
installed on ships.
They also tested a robot fish,
affectionately named “Silent Nemo,”
for stealth underwater missions.
It looks like a tuna,
in case you were wondering.
Ben fueled these advances with
the same strategies we saw at Pixar.
His first step was to recruit black sheep.
Many of them had been disciplined
for insubordination,
like one guy who was fired
from a nuclear submarine
for disobeying an order.
BK: It ended up being one of the key
innovation catalysts.
AG: How did you find them?
Was that a signal that you were
deliberately looking for?
“Let me just find a bunch of people
who are pissed off.”
BK: Yeah. (Laughs)
If you had the guts and the willingness
to put your name onto an idea
and publish it,
that already set you apart from the crowd.
And disruptors, while they’re
lone wolves to some extent,
they also find each other,
whether it’s in the cubicle next door
or the building across the way
or even across the country.
AG: Second, Ben gathered them together
to really listen to their frustrations,
rather than squash them.
BK: One of the phrases
that really makes me angry
is when senior leaders say,
“If you have a problem,
don’t tell it to me
unless you have a solution.”
Oftentimes, junior people
have lots of problems
they don’t know the solutions to,
and they need guidance.
This is untapped energy
that’s just waiting to be unleashed.
AG: Third, Ben rallied them
around a common enemy,
in this case, middle managers.
BK: We had this mismatch
between senior officers,
who really and truly wanted
the crazy ideas,
with those below them who had a mandate
to slow those things down.
And if we didn’t get their approval,
then we just jumped ahead of them
to their senior,
who usually was in our favor.
And you can use the bureaucracy
against itself in this sense,
because people will always fall in line.
AG: In Ben’s view, the lasting impact
of his work was in demonstrating
that this kind of innovation
could be fueled from the bottom up,
by black sheep inside the Navy.
They planted seeds for dozens of other
rapid innovation cells
across the military.
BK: And so for me, the greatest success
is the mindset that it created
within a very bureaucratic organization:
to take charge, to empower people
to run with an idea
and build a community
of support around that
and do it regardless of whether
or not you had official support.
AG: Alright, as much as I love
this whole recipe,
I have one little problem with it.
You can only use it once.
If you succeed, people
aren’t underdogs anymore.
That was Brad Bird’s big challenge
when it came time to make
a sequel to “The Incredibles.”
This time, the team was stacked
with hit makers.
There was no common enemy.
And they had three and a half
years to make the film.
It seems like it would have been harder
to frame the crew as underdogs,
given how remarkably successful
the original movie was.
BB: Except that they took a year
off of our schedule.
And suddenly, we’re the underdogs again.
We had a hell of a mountain to climb
that in many ways was taller
than our first one.
NPG: The studio asked us
to release the film a year earlier
than what we had originally planned.
A year is a lot.
We tried to reestablish
that underdog theme.
And taking a year off
the schedule sure helped.
AG: That’s one way to turn superstars
into underdogs again.
But to make it work, the new challenge
has to be meaningful or exciting,
not just an arbitrary burden.
BB: You know,
there’s an attitude out there,
a bunch of people
with their arms folded, like,
“This better be good.”
You know?
Which doesn’t help inspire
you to do anything good.
You know?
But what is challenging is,
can you take a year off the schedule
and still come out with a great movie
and come in on or under budget
and, you know, drop the mic?
AG: The team had the fuel they needed.
It became a just-manageable difficulty.
“Incredibles 2” grossed
over a billion dollars
in its first two months alone,
eclipsing the original film’s
total theatrical revenues.
It was nominated for an Oscar
and won the People’s Choice Award
for Favorite Family Movie.
BB: Yes, it’s cool for adults and kids.
AG: That’s what a bunch
of black sheep can do.
(Theme music)
And, oh yeah –
it’s now the highest grossing
animated film in American history.
Most importantly, it got six thumbs up
from my favorite experts.
(Clip with kids) What
was the first thing you said
when we came out of the theater?
Kid 2: I want to see it again and again.
AG: How many times have you seen it?
Kid 1: Uh … four?
AG: You’ve seen it four times? Why?
Kid 1: Because I like it.
Kid 2: I think it was twice
in the same week.
AG: WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant.
The show is produced by TED
with Transmitter Media.
Our team includes Colin Helms,
Gretta Cohn, Jessica Glazer,
Grace Rubenstein,
Angela Cheng and Janet Lee.
This episode was produced
by Dan O’Donnell.
Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan.
Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu
and Allison Leyton-Brown.
Ad stories produced
by Pineapple Street Media.
Special thanks to our sponsors:
Bonobos, Accenture, Hilton
and JPMorgan Chase.
Thanks to Bob Sutton for alerting us
to “The Incredibles” story,
and Jamie Woolf, Chris Wiggum,
Rick Sayre, Alan Barillaro
and Greg Brandeau,
for sharing their perspectives
and helping with interviews at Pixar,
as well as Rich Walsh in the military.
For their research: Jing Zhou
and Jennifer George
on dissatisfaction fueling creativity,
Sim Sitkin and colleagues on stretch goals
and Jane Dutton and Bob Duncan
on the fat cat syndrome.
Next time on WorkLife.
(Clip) Amy Cragg: We finished,
and I hear Shalane go,
“That was hard. I taste blood.”
And then she goes, “That’s so awesome.”
I was like, “You know what?
I’m going to find out
exactly what I’m made of here.”
AG: Olympic rivals
and pretty good friends, too.
We’ll explore how to get
the best of both worlds.
Kid 1: Beep, boop, beep!
Daddy, I’m in your studio!
Kid 3: Let’s push buttons!
Kid 1: Is that a microphone?
Kid 3: I’m Adam Grant and I have no hair
and my podcast is great!