Work 2.0: Rebel with a Cause

Hey there, Shankar here. Since we first published this episode with Francesca Gino in 2018, other researchers have raised concerns about the integrity of her work. In 2023, a group of scientists publicly alleged that she had fabricated data in some of her studies. You can find more information about their analysis at datacollada.org. Francesca Gino has denied the allegations. A number of her studies have been retracted by the journals that published them, including a study about karaoke That is referenced in this episode. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A few years ago, social scientist Francesca Gino was browsing the shelves at her local bookstore when she came across an unusual-looking book in the cooking section.

This recipe book that looked a little bit different, and the title said, Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef. And being Italian, I was very intrigued. And as I flipped through the pages, it became clear that this was not Your typical recipe book.

The dishes were playful, quirky, and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce, veal tongue with charcoal powder. The recipes had titles like How to Burn a Sardine.

And Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart. There were pictures of beautiful dishes. Who could resist the— a dish called the Crunchy Part of the Lasagna? Now, if you know anything about Italians, first of all, we have lots of rules when it comes to cooking. And second, we really cherish our traditional dishes, especially because they've been passed on for generations.

But this chef, one of the most successful in the world, couldn't resist circling back to one big existential question.

Why is it that we cook the dish in this way?

Why is it that we cook the dish in this way? It's the kind of question Francesca loved. As a professor at Harvard Business School, she studies nonconformists, specifically people who break the rules and end up in trouble. But now, standing at the bookstore, she wondered, can defying norms lead to innovation? Can letting go of tradition lead to the most sublime examples of creative thinking? To find out, she got in touch with the man behind the cookbook, the so-called Jimi Hendrix of Italian cooking, Massimo Bottura.

After a few conversations, he said, look, if you really want to understand the business, you got to come to Modena. And I was like, of course. Why say no to an invitation to a 3-Michelin-star restaurant? I'm on my way.

This week, we'll revisit a favorite conversation with Francesca about her mission to understand the minds of successful nonconformists.

I think we really need to shift our thinking. Rebels are not troublemakers. They're not outcasts. Rebels are people who break rules that should be broken. They break rules that hold them and others back. And their way of rule-breaking is constructive rather than destructive. It creates positive change.

Cultivating your inner rebel. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want— a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Francesca Gino is a busy person. She teaches at the Harvard Business School. She's a prolific researcher and writer. She advises corporations and nonprofit organizations on decision-making and negotiations. So she has no shortage of things on her to-do list. But when Chef Massimo Bottura offered her the chance to watch him in action at his restaurant, she knew she needed to hop on a plane and go to Italy.

So I showed up at the restaurant for my first day with my notebook, and basically I was given an apron. For the entire day, I was put to work in the front of the house as a server. And again, it was an amazing experience because I had no qualification. I clearly didn't know what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes. But that was just an example of doing things a little bit differently.

So, of course, if you're a smart chef, the one thing you don't do is bring an amateur into your 3-Michelin-star restaurant and ask her to start serving the dishes. I can just imagine all the ways that that could go wrong. Did it?

That is exactly what was going through my head as I was making mistakes, from putting the very carefully arranged dishes down onto the table. There are very specific ways in which the dish gets arranged so that you get the right anticipation Mm-hmm. Anticipation of what the dish is gonna be about as you eat it. And throughout the day, the team members who were working with me in the front of the house were just helping me. And when I was making mistakes, they were very subtly trying to correct. So, they were adjusting the plate, or if I brought to a table the wrong utensils, they would show up and somehow bring another set that was the right set for the type of dish that was being served.

So I understand that if I were to visit the restaurant, I might sometimes see Massimo Bottura outside unloading produce from the trucks or sweeping the pavement. He doesn't seem like someone who stands on airs.

He's very much into the trenches. One of the first things that he does when he shows up at the restaurant in the morning is to put his white chef's coat on, and then he does go outside with a broom and sweep the streets. And you're there looking at him, and this The sous chef and the people working in the restaurants are there looking at him, and you ask the question, why is it that he's doing that? But the second question that you ask yourself is, why is it that I'm not doing it? And so you are feeling motivated to take on roles and activities that are roles that are not scripted because of where you sit or where you work in the restaurant. It's very refreshing.

And of course, he actually tries to bring this approach to the food that he is making as well. I want you to listen to this clip of music because it— you say the chef actually asked his staff to build a dish based on this song.

Holly came from Miami, FLA. Hitchhiked her way across the USA. Plucked her eyebrows on the way. Shaved her legs and then he was a she. She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side. Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

So what was going on, Francesca? How do you make a dish based on a song?

It was one of the many ways that Massimo Bottura inspires the people working in the kitchen and really asks them to bring out their own contribution and their own voices. So you would see him walk into the kitchen and say, Lou Reed, Walk to the Outside, or a different name of a song, or a different poem, or the name of a phrase of something that he was reading recently, or the name of a piece of art that he saw at an art show. And what he's trying to do is asking people to think about how that song or how that piece of art inspired them to come up with their own dish. And what he's trying to do at the very core is making sure that people don't show up at work and somehow they leave their identity at the door, but rather they show up and they're being who they are. They're bringing their ideas forward, their contributions forward, independent of their background, their nationalities, or how much training they have.

And when you spoke to the staff at the restaurant, what did they say the role of the chef was in inspiring them? Did they actually agree Do you think that these techniques were actually bringing out the best in them?

What the staff said, which is really interesting, is that Massimo is the type of leader who never says, I, I, I, I. He's always about the we. He describes the restaurant as a crew or as a ship. As a— in fact, he often talks about being on a pirate ship. And sometimes the waters out there are going to be turbulent, but for the very fact that we are going to bring out our individual contributions, but we're going to do so being aware that we are part of a team. No matter how turbulent the sea is, we're going to succeed. And people do feel very inspired by the way he leads the restaurant.

Here's another thing that makes Massimo a rebel. He asks a lot of questions about why things are the way they are.

For Francesca, a fearless curiosity is at the heart of rebel talent.

Bottura opened up a restaurant by asking the question, why not? He had no experience in running a restaurant, let alone cooking, because he didn't go to culinary school. He was in law school. He was there for 2 years as a way to stick to what his father wanted. And then he didn't enjoy it. And when his Brother, one of these brothers told him about this restaurant that was up for sale, he really asked himself the question, why not? That's curiosity. We are so often focused on efficiency and getting things done. We have a very long to-do list, but what that often comes at the cost of is allowing us to explore the way we used to when we were a very little kid. And that came very naturally to us. So I see too many leaders who focus so much on efficiency that curiosity is shut down in people. And that's too bad because curiosity leads to all sorts of great results and great outcomes.

There's a tension that runs through much of the book. And the tension is the tension between expertise and experimentation. And I want to come back and talk about this over and over again. But I also want to do it through the lens of another story that you explore. You've looked at the story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, better known as Captain Sully. He was at the controls of US Airways Flight 1549. The plane had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York. A flock of birds flies into the plane. I want to play you a bit of tape from the cockpit recorder.

Cactus 1549, turn left heading 270. This is Cactus 1539. Hit birds, lost thrust. I'm about to turn back towards LaGuardia.

Captain Sully radios air traffic controllers in New York. Using the call sign Cactus 1539. The plane is descending at a terrifying rate. The controllers try to figure out what to do.

Tower, stop your departures, got emergency returning. Who is this? It's 1529. He, uh, bird strike. He lost all engine— he lost the thrust in the engines. He's returning immediately. Cactus 1529, which engines? He lost thrust in both engines, he said. Got it.

Captain Sully asks for landing options. But he quickly decides none of them will work.

Cactus 1529, turn right 280. You can land runway 1 at Peterborough. We can't do it.

And then?

We're gonna be in the Hudson. I'm sorry, say again, Cactus? 210, 2718. I don't know, I think he said he was going in the Hudson. Cactus 1529, you still on? Cactus 1529, if you can—

Landing a plane in the Hudson River. Francesca, you describe this incident as a striking example of rebel talent.

Why?

If you think about the situation that Captain Sully was under, most of us would go to the obvious answer. We are under a lot of pressure. We have no time. We are really stressed. And what our mind would do very naturally is to narrow our way of thinking. But if you read the accident reports, or if you were to talk to Sully, you would understand that what he did instead was to consider options. He kept asking himself, what it is that I could be doing? And in a place where most people would close their mind, he kept his mind open. Rather than going to the obvious answer of landing to the nearest airport, he thought creatively about the problem and came up with this idea of landing in the Hudson River. So that's what rebels are all about. People who, rather than just following the script or just following what they've learned in their training, they stay open-minded. They look at the problem from a very different perspective, no matter how much time they have to think about it, and then they creatively solve the problem. Captain Sully had 208 seconds by the time he discovered that he had no thrust in the engine and the time he ditched the plane in the Hudson River. That's true.

One of the things, again, the story reveals to me is this tension between expertise and experimentation. So if you have expertise, but you're not willing to experiment, you become predictable. You become boring. But if you experiment without having expertise, that can be amateurish. If you ask me to land a plane in the Hudson River, it's going to end in disaster. So there's something that happens when you combine expertise with experimentation. That's where the magic is.

Exactly. One of the things that many people might not know about Captain Sully that I learned when I had the opportunity to interview him is that by the time the accident happened, he had experience flying all sorts of planes. He also served as a volunteer in teams that look at prior accidents and try to understand what it is that happened. So he had so much experience. Once he was in that dire situation. And yet, one of the things that is true about him is that every time he walked on a plane, he asked himself the question, what is it that I could learn? How is it that this could be different? He had that type of intellectual humility that kept him open-minded despite the fact that he was throughout his career a lot of experience. That's what often we miss out on. We gain experience, and by gaining experience and knowledge, we believe that we all have the right answer, and we don't stay humble. We don't have that type of intellectual humility that keeps us focused on what's left to learn rather than what it is that we know already.

Captain Sully and Massimo Bottura tried daring things and achieved extraordinary results. It's easy to admire them. But why is it so hard to be like them? It turns out a curious psychological roadblock often gets in the way. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud— new customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're talking about successful rebels, people who defy the status quo and produce creative breakthroughs. We've seen how this worked with Captain Sully and Chef Bottura. So why are people like this so rare? Why do so many of us find it hard to channel our inner Bottura? You might think the problem is We're not experts. We're not skilled chefs or great pilots. But in fact, the problem is often the opposite. We know too much. Francesca Gino is a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Business School and author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.

My colleagues and I were fascinated by this idea that experience could be costly, because in a lot of our classes, we're actually there telling our students that they should gain knowledge, that information is power, that experience is important. And so we explored this in a dataset of millions of data points on how cardiologists behave in their surgery when they do open-heart surgeries. And what was interesting is that we could explore what happened to this cardiologist, and there'll be behavior after the Food and Drug Administration put out an announcement that, if I were to simplify, basically told them that the way they were using the technology in their surgery was not good for patients. And what we found in the data that was striking is that the more experience the surgeon had, the less likely they were to change their behavior. That means that, as you were suggesting, when we gain experience, often we feel like the expert. And we think that we know better, even when we hear information or when we see evidence that speaks to the fact that we're wrong. And so having that learning mindset as we're gaining experience is so, so important.

And of course, that's difficult to do precisely because once you know something, you ask yourself, why should I go back to becoming a beginner? You describe a very interesting study that was done out of Columbia University looking at guitar players. And one way that expert guitarists could learn to once again think like beginners. Tell me about that study.

This is a study by Ting Zhang. And she was fascinated by this idea that once you're an expert, it's very difficult to look at problems with the eyes of a novice. And so one way she thought she could address this very issue is by asking experts to relive the experience of being a novice. So in one of her studies, she recruited experienced people who play guitar.

She asked some of them, the control group, to play as they would on a typical day. Of course, they sounded great. She asked the others to play a song with their non-dominant hand. Lefties played with the right hand, right-handed people played with their left hand. It instantly made them feel like beginners again.

The experience is very humbling. Because you are sort of reminded of what it is that you knew and didn't know as you started. And when she compared the advice that these people were giving to others who were interested in learning how to play the guitar, the advice was much more helpful when it came to this second group of people rather than the group of people who played the guitar as you would usually do.

As I'm hearing you tell me about the guitar study, it reminds me of something else you have in the book, this insight that in many fields, the people who are The innovators are often not the people who've been in those fields for extended periods of time. That it's often the newcomers to a field who have just about enough information to have mastered the rules, but have not spent so much time in the culture that they've become hidebound. These are the people who are actually able to take the culture and move it in new directions. You talk about the role of how this works in science. There have been people who've tried to solve scientific problems by inviting people who are not necessarily science experts, but people who are outsiders. Right.

It's quite interesting to think about the fact that probably all of us have had at some point in our lives or another, a moment in which we were trying to tackle a problem where we felt we were the expert, but we were stuck and we weren't— we were not able to come up with a solution. And what is interesting is that when we in fact bring in people who might not have the right expertise, they're going to look at the problem from a very different perspective. And that type of difference in perspective, in opinions, in the way you are looking and analyzing the problem can be quite powerful in helping you find a solution. And there are companies out there that, in fact, have used this insight and created businesses, like Eli Lilly would be one of them, where when there are very difficult challenges, they put them out there such that not only the people with the right expertise might want to tackle the problem, but all others, people who might not have the right expertise, can chime in. And often the solutions come exactly from those people. It's a good reminder that expertise, while wonderful, creates potential problems if we use it as a way of saying, I know the answer, I'm the expert. You look at the problem too narrowly, usually only from one perspective, and it's our own perspective. And instead, having this learning mindset, bringing in novices into the problem allows us to now look at the situation from many different angles and viewpoints.

Of course, this speaks to the idea of the value of diversity. I think that's one of the insights that I'm getting from what you just said. Having a mix of people in the room who look at things from different perspectives could just be inherently valuable.

Having people who look at the problem from very different perspective is, in fact, a key to solving tough problems. But the reality is that many of us don't want to be challenged. It's so much easier to go through life, whether at work or at home for that matter, with people that just nod their heads and say, yep, I agree with you. But rebel leaders and rebel employees are people who really try to surround themselves with people who think differently and with people who do challenge them.

I asked Francesca about another rebel she mentions in her book, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay. You might be familiar with her work in movies such as Selma, an account of a series of famous civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965.

That means freedom. That means protest. That means march. That means disturb the peace. That means jail. That means risk.

And that is hard.

And you say that her story reveals another really important idea when it comes to rebel talent, which is the importance of being vigilant to stereotypes, to recognize that stereotypes can actually serve as a kind of straitjacket that prevents us from thinking creatively.

In all sorts of spheres of life, we are affected by stereotypes, or more generally, we accept social roles that others have passed on to us. And the story of Ava DuVernay is a beautiful one because she just doesn't do that. And this comes from a person who decided to go to filmmaking later in her career. She was doing a different job and she said, I'm gonna switch and enter this job. And in the advice that she was receiving from others, everybody was talking about the importance of really being supported by others, reaching out to networks. She didn't have that. And she just started picking up the camera and working on her own movies. And in fact, the first films she created were supported by her own savings. And then she became known for the work that she was doing, for the fact that she was not accepting the rules of the business, but in a sense, she was working and fighting against them. And it's quite amazing and inspiring as a story. And so for me, I made my first film, my first feature film, when I was 38. So it's never too late.

That I—

I just started from the outside.

Rebels constructively break the rules. They push ahead even when they don't have the support of power brokers. And once they achieve success, they continue to think like beginners and go out of their way to learn from those who disagree with them. So how can you activate your inner nonconformist? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Today we're talking about rebels, people who break free of social norms and achieve incredible feats of imagination. Why is this something so few of us do? One problem is that we know too much. We become experts in our fields and then fall back on familiar routines. We forget how to see the world with fresh eyes. But it doesn't have to be this way. Francesca Gino says that being a rebel is a skill that all of us can cultivate. Sometimes it takes only small steps. A few years ago, she wondered if getting people to feel comfortable about being uncomfortable could be the first step in activating their inner rebel.

She asked students to stand before their friends and classmates and sing Don't Stop Believing by Journey. Can you set up the experiment for me, Francesca?

I'm putting my hand in my hair as I was reminded Yeah. When I was running this study, this was a study that was inspired by the notion that when we break rules, when we break away from what other people expect of us, we feel a sense of confidence. And so to test that, I brought undergraduates to the lab, and I asked them to engage in the task that you just heard, stand up in front of a video with a microphone and in front of other participants watching you, singing Don't Stop Believin'. That was one of the songs. And some of the participants did just that, but some others were asked to wear a bandana as they were singing, something that they told me made them uncomfortable. And then I was interested in seeing whether the anxiety and stress that they experienced during the task and their level of confidence, in addition to their performance, was going to be different in these 2 different conditions. And it was. Both looking at physiological measure of stress, but also their self-reported measures in answering the question of how confident they felt, people who were wearing the bandana while they were singing in front of their peers felt more confident, felt less stress. Don't stop believing. Hold on to that feeling.

Streetlights.

So despite the fact that they thought they would feel more uncomfortable and that it would be harder for them, the fact that they were wearing their bandana, something that the peers didn't expect, was actually helpful to them. And this is not just their feelings and their physiology. When you look at the performance in terms of how much they stay on tune, Since the karaoke was recording that objectively, they did better.

So there's a paradox here because in the one case, you're asking one set of students to sing the song, which is clearly difficult, and especially before your friends in a classroom, it's difficult to do. But the second group is being asked to do something even more difficult. You're asking them to sing the song and also wear this nonconforming headdress. And you would think that the second group would do worse, but you found exactly the opposite.

Exactly. Oftentimes we think that breaking rules is gonna lead to worse outcomes and it's gonna make us feel uncomfortable. And it does to a certain extent, but it then turns into confidence and that confidence translates in better performance. It is paradoxical, but it's one of the big lessons in being rebelliousness. It does pay off.

I understand that you've You've discovered this about yourself as well. You've run experiments of a sort where you try on the effects of different kinds of footwear and the effects it has on your audiences.

One time, I was asked to teach 2 classes, the same class, back to back. And in each class, I had 110 executives. And since I was teaching the same content across the 2 classes, what I thought I could do is change my shoes. In between the 2 classes. And that's exactly what I did. So picture this professor dressed up in a really nice suit. And for the first class, I was wearing formal leather shoes, probably what the students expected from an HBS professor or a professor in general teaching in Exec Ed. But for the second class, I changed out my leather shoes for a pair of red sneakers. And it was interesting to walk to class. My colleagues were giving me the strange look, thinking what it is that she's doing. And I was going to teach my second class. And at the end of each of the 2 classes, I gave the executives a little survey. And in the survey, I was asking them questions like, how much do you think I charge for my consulting? How much influence do you think I have at HBS as a professor? How often do you think I publish in a practitioner-oriented magazine like Harvard Business Review? And what was interesting is that these are measures that capture how much influence the student thought I had. And what the survey results showed is that they had higher respect. They thought of me as a more influential person when I taught them the same content, just wearing red sneakers.

So, of course, people listening to this are going to go out and get red sneakers and wear bandanas to work tomorrow because that's what you're saying is going to get them taken more seriously.

I recently did a training for a company around the issues of rebel talent, and the people who invited me out were all in a team wearing red sneakers, and they got a lot of compliments and questions throughout the day. So, yes, that could be one of the lessons learned out of this research.

Another way we can all get better at breaking the rules is to stay mindful of the things happening around us. Sometimes we're so focused on the job at hand that we fail to see how the situation might afford us opportunities to demonstrate leadership and authenticity. Maurice Cheeks had such an opportunity on April 25th, 2003, during the NBA playoffs. Maurice was coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and his team was down 2-0 in the series. It was a high-stakes moment.

And now to honor America and salute the men and women serving our country with our national anthem.

20,000 excited basketball fans are in the Rose Garden in Portland. The crowd falls silent as a nervous-looking 13-year-old girl walks toward the microphone. Please welcome, as voted by you the fans, our winner of the Toyota Get the Feeling of a Star promotion, Natalie Gilbert.

Oh, say can you see?

At first, things go well. Natalie looks confident, relaxed.

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? And as you can hear, she is making a mistake. She's looking for her father to get some support, and then somebody shows up to help her.

It's Maurice Cheeks. At a moment when you might think that all his attention would be focused on his team and their chances in the game, Maurice has the presence of mind to realize that a child is in trouble. He has a daughter about Natalie's age. He rushes up to stand beside her.

He drapes an arm around her and says, come on, come on.

Stars light, last gleaming.

Natalie hesitates. She doesn't know this stranger in the gray suit who has come up to stand by her side. But Maurice Cheeks is now singing, and Natalie is lifted along. Natalie looks confident again.

Her voice soars. And then something happens in the stadium.

Thousands of fans, the players, they see what Maurice has done.

And now everyone is singing. That story It is triumphant.

I often use the video clip in class.

Yes.

And then the question that I ask after the clip is, does this guy have a good voice? And he doesn't. And what is interesting is that it took him no time to walk in and help. He made himself vulnerable in front of 20,000 fans and millions of viewers from home. That's what rebels do. They are not worried about what others are thinking. But they make themselves vulnerable in a way that gains them respect from those around them.

There's something infectious about authenticity.

There is. Authenticity is contagious. Once we see people making themselves vulnerable, rather than judging them negatively, we actually respect them. And we ask ourselves questions about why is it that we're covering up? We should be more willing to be authentic as well and bring ourselves forwards as we interact with others.

There's something I've often thought about when I see people do brave things. And I ask myself, are they being fearless, or is it actually something else? And as I watched this clip, Francesca, it occurred to me that maybe authentic people are not fearless. It's just that the passion they have for the things they care about is greater than their fears. I think that's what I'm seeing with the basketball coach.

I think it's certainly an element of it. You're seeing that the person is struggling, and the first thought that comes to mind is, oh my gosh, I don't have a good voice. I can help here. You just see a person who needs help, and you walk in without the worry of what others are actually thinking. Again, it's more of where is that you're keeping your focus. And too often, we walk through life or we come to work being very much focused on the impressions that we're making on others and what they're going to see in us, what it is they're going to comment on when I put an idea forward. And he didn't. He wasn't worried about that. He was more focused on the fact that there was somebody there who could use the help. And he knew, and he was close enough that he could, in fact, step in and help.

One of the pieces of research that I remember you doing some years ago has to do with the phenomenon of humble bragging, where people essentially play down what they're doing as a way to sort of show off how good they are. And in some ways, there seems to be a difference between vulnerability and humble bragging. But I don't quite know how that distinction comes about.

With humble bragging, what you're trying to do is say something that is about one of your accomplishments or something that you achieved. But you're trying to be indirect. With making yourself vulnerable or talking about your mistakes, you're being very direct. And you're being authentic, and people really see through that. There is research that shows that people almost experience inauthenticity in others, and there is almost like, I don't wanna be close to that person because they're being inauthentic. And instead, when we are making ourselves vulnerable, when we are willing to speak up about our weaknesses, we're basically telling the world, we are telling others that we are not perfect, that we are humans.

One of the things that makes this book so interesting, Francesca, is that you've spent so much of your career exploring the pitfalls of breaking the rules. And of course, this is standard fare for many academics. We've had co-authors of yours like Dacher Keltner and Dan Ariely on the show talking about unethical behavior, the risks of power. Powerful people often feel they can break the rules, act with impunity. In some ways, it makes sense that many of us are nervous about rule-breaking because we've seen the consequences of rule-breakers. Lots of times, breaking the rules doesn't lead to good consequences.

Fundamentally, breaking rules and being rebellious means leaving what's comfortable and known and familiar. And so people perceive it as risky business. But what the book hopefully teaches us, or at least in looking at the story of these rebels, what I've learned is that It might feel uncomfortable at first, but really it does pay off. We are more confident when we're breaking rules. We also are much more engaged in the activities that we are working on, and we also end up with better, more trusting relationships. So there is a lot of goodness that comes from rule breaking, but we do need to shift our thinking. Is rule-breaking that is constructive, not rule-breaking that is destructive. So when I think about a lot of the years that I spent looking at cheating and why is it that people steal and what organizations could do about it, that's rule-breaking that is destructive. But the type of rule-breaking that we are talking about now, though risky or uncomfortable, it's rule-breaking that leads I'm wondering if the distinction is as simple as that, though.

Isn't it possible that in some ways people who break the rules can, in fact, go over the edge? I remember visiting Facebook many years ago, and there were posters on the walls saying, you know, move fast and break things. And Facebook, of course, was an enormous rebel success story in Silicon Valley. But increasingly, a lot of people feel the company has gone too far, that it's broken too many rules, that it's actually run afoul of what we think a company should be doing, even on questions of national security and democracy. And I understand the point you're making. It would be nice if we could easily demarcate the rule breakers who are constructive from the rule breakers who are destructive. But isn't it possible that there is actually a pretty thin line between the two?

When I think about the various businesses and organizations that I studied as I was working on the book, I've noticed a couple of things that seems to be really important when we think about this thin line. First is the fact that in businesses where people are encouraged to break the rules, the leaders are very clear on the rules that should not be broken. Context in which you absolutely need to follow the guidelines or the rules. So, one example that comes to mind is Ariel Investment, a Chicago-based money management firm. If you were to visit the firm, what you would see is that the leaders are really trying to make sure that people are staying open-minded, that they're using all the talents that I talk about in the book. But if you go to certain places, Everybody in the firm is going to tell you, there, you got to follow the rules. So, for example, if a letter goes out to a client, everybody knows that the 3 different people need to look at the letter to make sure that it's clear, that there are no typos, that the language is appropriate, because otherwise you would affect the reputation of the firm negatively. That's a rule that everybody knows should not be broken. So, as these examples suggest, there is much clarity.

Yeah.

around the rules that really you don't want people to break. And second, another thing that I noticed in businesses that encourage rebelliousness is the fact that once you trust people to break rules, they seem to have very good judgment. They sort of decide on their feet the situations where you really should be putting your head down and follow the script. script rather than using your mind in a creative way to come up with a different solution. So that type of good judgment is something that I've seen in so many different rebels and in so many organizations where people are encouraged to be rebellious.

You sometimes describe this as positive deviance in the book, but of course, in many companies and organizations, Someone who comes along and says, let's do things differently. The way we've been doing things all this time has been wrong. I mean, that person is often seen as a troublemaker.

Oftentimes what's different between a troublemaker and a rebel in the way I think of rebels is the delivery. Many people after I was working on the book and they heard about it asked me to go and watch them in their work because they said, I'm clearly a rebel, but it's not paying off for me. And so in a couple of cases, I did go. I was watching them as they were interacting with their colleagues, and the elements of rebelliousness were there, but the delivery was wrong. So, they were coming across as arrogant. If they were in a discussion and they thought that the discussion needed to go in a different direction, rather than saying, I see the value in your idea, and I think we can also bring to bear a different perspective, they were more, Shutting down the idea, letting the person know how wrong the idea was prior to bringing forward their ideas. There are the troublemakers. Maybe people are breaking rules just for the sake of breaking rules. Rebels instead are really being constructive in their approach in a way that creates positive change.

I'm wondering how writing and researching this book has changed your own life. How have you tried to internalize these lessons? At home, as a parent, as a partner, as a friend, as a colleague, and as a professional?

In all spheres of life, I've changed my behavior quite a bit, or at least I find myself pausing and trying to learn how to be an effective rebel. There is a story that I tell in the book about my son, who at the time was about 4 and a half years old. This is the time where curiosity is at its best. You keep asking why and what if type of questions. And it's early in the morning and Alex is, my son's name, is having his breakfast. So a bowl of milk with some cereal. And as he's sitting at the counter, stirring his milk, he looks at my husband and says, Daddy, do we still have the coloring bottles that we used to use when we color eggs at Easter? So my husband is sort of looking confused, but he says, yes. And he walks to the cabinet, he opens it up and gets the bottle to Alex and said, Alex, what are you going to do with it? And Alex smiled and said, I'm going to color my breakfast. And you should have seen the face of my husband. He was confused, sort of disappointed. And he looked back at Alex and said, Alex, we don't do that. And Alex, being a 4-and-a-half-year-old boy, said, why not? Very reasonable question. And then my husband, even more confused with Alex's answer, looked at me and said, we don't do that, right? And that was a beautiful moment for me. As we were trying to struggle through this question of whether we do it or we don't do it, Alex opened up the bottle and started putting red coloring in his milk, and all of a sudden the cereals were happily swimming in pink milk. And it's a perfect example of how often we go through life and there are rules that we put out there that maybe should be questions. Why is it that milk needs to be white for breakfast? I actually tried it. So I now had pink milk, yellow milk, green milk, and it tastes just the same to me. If anything, you're really smiling as you start off your day.

Francesca, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Really fun to be talking to you, so thank you.

Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.

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