Management scholar Adam Grant discusses research showing how firms that hire candidates based on how well they will fit into the company's culture perform differently depending on the stage of the business. Grant, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, also presents another question for businesses to consider when hiring: What can this person contribute to the company's culture?

Bestselling author Adam Grant describes a simple exercise that helped managers get out of an overly critical mindset and into a more creative headspace: Before evaluating a work-related idea, brainstorm for five minutes about something in a completely different domain. The exercise primes managers to be more open-minded and receptive to new ideas, according to Grant, a professor of management at The Wharton School.

Adam Grant, author of the 2016 bestseller "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World," critiques the familiar manager's mantra, "Don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions." He explains how that suppresses an organization's toughest problems and discourages inquiry. The Wharton School professor also shares an exercise that businesses can do to uncover new opportunities - where, ironically, teams imagine all the ways competitors might kill the company.

Wharton School Professor Adam Grant discusses the concept behind his 2016 bestseller "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World." Describing "originals" as people who are driven to stand up and speak out in the name of innovation, Grant says his goal was to understand how we can better champion original thinkers, and how organizations can embrace non-conformists. "Most originality dies in the idea-selection process," he explains.

Adam Grant, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about how the energy of nervous anticipation allows "defensive pessimists" to perform just as well as those who calmly prepare for a looming challenge and visualize success in advance. He adds that efforts to reduce stress in such instances can even be counterproductive. "The great thing about both anxiety and excitement is they both involve uncertainty," Grant observes.

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.