The Originals

Why Adam Grant Refused to Invest in Warby Parker

In 2009, Adam Grant was offered a small slice of a company four of his Wharton students were trying to launch. They wanted to sell glasses online for ninety-five dollars instead of five hundred. They had a clever name borrowed from two Jack Kerouac characters. They had a plan to donate a pair for every pair sold. Grant said no. Six years later, Fast Company named those four students the most innovative company in America — ahead of Google, Nike, and Apple. Their company was valued at more than a billion dollars. Grant calls the moment he passed "the worst financial decision I've ever made." That admission opens *Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World*, and it does something most business books refuse to do — it concedes, on page one, that the author would have killed the very idea he is now writing a book to celebrate.

That's the puzzle the book sets out to solve. We all claim to admire original thinkers, the people who see what everyone else missed and act on it. But when they're sitting right across from us, asking for a check or a yes vote or just a fair hearing, we fold our arms. Grant wants to know why. He also wants to know how a handful of people — Carmen Medina at the CIA, Lucy Stone at the front of the suffrage movement, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, a Serbian student named Srdja Popovic who helped take down a dictator with a clenched fist and a few good jokes — manage to push their ideas through anyway. The answer turns out to be very different from the mythology of the fearless rebel. Originals, in Grant's telling, are mostly reluctant, anxious, deeply hedged people who learned a few specific moves. The good news is that the moves are teachable.