Skewed Incentives Stifle Originality

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania

Adam Grant, one of today’s most influential management thinkers, talks about the biases and skewed incentives that can cause middle managers to resist new ideas. Too often, mid-level managers use intuition, which Grant says is based mostly on past experiences and is therefore useless in evaluating truly novel ideas. He explains how middle managers can be punished for endorsing a bad idea, but not rejecting a good one.