Why this Wharton wunderkind wants leaders to replace their intuition with evidence

The Washington Post:

It’s just hours before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, but Adam Grant is talking about baseball. More specifically, he’s talking about a psychology study that discovered the most frequent base stealers tend to be younger siblings.

“I hate this evidence as a card-carrying firstborn,” he told the crowd sipping cocktails at author Daniel Pink’s Cleveland Park home in Washington, there to mark the release of Grant’s book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.” But the study shows it’s probably true, Grant says. “A younger sibling is more than 10 times as likely to try and succeed at stealing a base.”

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Fellow academics remark on his relentless pace of publishing both peer-reviewed scholarly papers and articles for popular audiences — he writes columns in the New York Times, blog posts on LinkedIn and has a constant presence on social media. “I think we can say that he makes the rest of us feel like slackers,” says Peter Cappelli, another Wharton professor.

While he is prolific, he doesn’t sacrifice on quality, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “One reason I have such high regard for Adam,” he says, is that it’s “unusual for someone with that level of popular appeal to be so substantive.”

Read the whole story: The Washington Post