You’re Waiting Too Long to Change Your Business Plans
Treat work more like an experiment, and find people in your life who will challenge your assumptions, a new book says.
Illustration: Yann Bastard for Bloomberg Businessweek
Too often, we stubbornly hitch our futures to bad ideas, University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant says. In his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, he writes that many people fail to reassess their careers and investments quickly enough and don’t make changes until it’s too late. Here’s his cheat sheet on how to make timely pivots—and what to do when you’re not the one who needs to adjust.
Think like a scientist. Treat work—from individual projects to the trajectory of your career—as an experiment. For example, if you’re an entrepreneur, approach your business strategy as a hypothesis that gets tested every time you introduce a product or service. This infuses your plans with flexibility rather than dogmatism. “You’re more likely to abandon a failing strategy or a product that isn’t working and go in a different direction,” says Grant.