Adam Grant

How high should we aim?

I think there's a pretty long-standing body of evidence that shows that leaders are reluctant to let their teams participate in the goal-setting process because you think your job is to stretch people, and they're probably going to aim too low.

And the reality is the opposite, that if people are committed and passionate, they will set their own goals higher than the people above them tend to.

And so I wonder if it'd be interesting to take small teams and say, what do you think is possible?

And then see where they set their targets and use that to inform where you are.

Is that something you've already experimented with?

Bingo.

I would run that as an innovation tournament.

Have you done any of those before?

All right.

So the most boring innovation tournament I've ever seen was at Dow Chemical.

They said, we're looking for ideas to save energy and reduce waste.

And I'm like, yeah, that's what motivates me in the morning.

Yeah.

But they said, we want to put some parameters around this so you know what we're looking for.

We'll take any idea that costs no more than $200,000 and has the potential to pay for itself within a year if it's successful.

And they end up running that tournament for 10 years.

They bet on 575 ideas and it saves the company on average $110 million per year.

I was blown away by that because most of these creative ideas did not come from people who were doing innovation.

It was somebody on a factory floor who saw something broken and didn't know where to take the idea until they had this, oh, okay, now I have guidelines and guardrails around what's worth submitting.