Weird Ideas That Work

Find some happy people and get them to fight. Hire people who make you uncomfortable. Reward success and failure, punish inaction. These and other ideas might make you squirm, but they spark innovation, too.

Creativity, new ideas, innovation — in any age they are keys to success, but in today’s whirlwind economy they are essential for survival itself. Yet, as Robert Sutton explains, the standard rules of business behavior and management are precisely the opposite of what it takes to build an innovative company. We are told to hire people who will fit in; to train them extensively; and to work to instill a corporate culture in every employee. In fact, in order to foster creativity, we should hire misfits, goad them to fight, and pay them to defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture. Weird Ideas That Work codifies these and other proven counterintuitive ideas to help you turn your workplace from staid and safe to wild and woolly — and creative.

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A spectacular achievement. Sutton and Rao show that friction is the secret source of organizational failure―and success. Full of practical advice, this book will make the world a better place.

Cass R. Sunstein

Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, author of Sludge

Friction―good and bad―is among the most important but least understood elements of an organization. Get it right, and your team will wake up happy to go to work, get it wrong, and you'll make everyone miserable and undermine their ability to scale your vision. Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao have spent the last decade studying the causes and remedies for friction troubles at a wide range of companies. They’ve distilled their lessons to help you and your team make the right things easier and the wrong things harder in your company. Every executive, investor, board member, and leader should buy The Friction Project.

Reid Hoffman

Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Partners

The idea of leaders as friction fixers is dynamite. Their job is to remove obstacles to help teams drive decisions and impact, whether that’s through eliminating friction that’s impeding progress or introducing friction to foster debate and better outcomes. Sutton’s and Rao’s insights in The Friction Project offer leaders at all levels important tools and real-world examples to recognize the role that both kinds of friction can play in their organization’s success.

Shantanu Narayan

Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Adobe

Subtract friction and an organization will move faster, become more innovative and drive productivity gains. The Friction Project is a “how to” guide in a period of workforce transformation across sectors.

Donna Morris

Executive Vice President, Chief People Officer, Walmart Inc.

This is the ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your organization. No one knows more about making work better than this pair of experts, and they’ve produced a remarkably insightful, engrossing, evidence-based, and actionable read. If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.

Adam Grant

#1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

Bob was great! He was so easy to work with and made a real effort to customize his content to our business needs. He was accessible, flexible, and spot-on in his delivery.

Microsoft

Bob did an amazing job of reaching our audience by relating personal experiences and examples from across various industries that held relevance for an industry that is centuries old and is driven by relationships, new products, news and fun.

Anheuser Bush

Bob was fantastic. He has an energy level that is off that charts and backs it up with real passion. He connected with the audience perfectly. The content was interesting to the partners and all the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. He had a real impact on the event.

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