Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life

Francesca Gino is Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School, and she's the author of several influential articles in Harvard Business Review. She's also a relentlessly curious analyst of human behavior, and in particular of decision making. In this work, she draws on psychology and sociology, as well as her own specialties of business and economics.

So, keep listening to hear how new experiences can deliver unexpected dividends, how a planeload of people was saved from near-certain death, and how to become a rebel leader in your own right.

The book starts by describing one of Napoleon Bonaparte's battles, drawing out his qualities as a general and politician. He was an innovator and a deep-thinking strategist, but also a man who would fight in the front line if the situation demanded it. This was unusual behavior for a European monarch, as was Napoleon's attitude to law-making and political reform. He was a leader who was happy to break with convention in order to achieve success.

This is one of several examples that Gino presents to define "rebel talent," which she says consists of five central characteristics. She outlines these in the introduction and goes on to organize much of the book around them, with a chapter focusing on each.

The first characteristic is novelty. Rebels seek out new challenges and experiences. One of the threads that holds the book together is the author's experience with Italian chef Massimo Bottura, to which she returns time and again.

He's earned three Michelin stars, the highest award a chef can achieve, by continuously finding new ways to rework classic Italian cuisine. His dishes involve traditional ingredients, but cooked in new ways, with extraordinary flair and attention to detail.

Bottura had no experience as a restaurateur before he opened his restaurant in Modena. But he did have a passion for novelty, which brought him huge success and continues to drive him forward.

Gino also cites an example from the other end of the dining spectrum: a fast-food restaurant chain in Tennessee. Here, on any given day, employees don't know which part of the process they'll be doing until they arrive for work. The promise of constantly changing activities engages and stimulates them. As a result, their pride in their work increases, and so does customer satisfaction.

Gino believes that breaking with conventional habits can bring significant benefits, to individuals and organizations. In an example from her own life, she discusses the class she and her husband took in improvisational comedy (or "improv"). They both had misgivings, thinking they weren't capable of being funny. Frequent moments of embarrassment followed. Even so, the novelty of the experience gave them a stronger sense of who they were and what they could do.

The second key characteristic is curiosity. Gino defines this as the impulse always to ask questions. Why do we do things in a particular way? How could we do them differently? What could we do now that would most improve our current situation?

Curiosity encourages people to think creatively, and to examine existing practices with a critical eye. Henry Ford is often cited as a great industrial innovator, and rightly so: he introduced the production line to the automobile industry, and revolutionized manufacturing. But Gino points out that when people began to expect more from cars than the Model T could provide, Ford was slow to react.

By contrast, General Motors decided to get to know the market deeply and to respond as it evolved. The company focused on understanding its customers' changing needs and desires, and produced different vehicles for different market segments. As a result, it was able to overtake Ford's market share by the end of the 1920s.

The third characteristic of rebel talent is perspective. This is the ability to broaden your view of a situation, so you see it in a more productive way. This might mean viewing situations through the eyes of another person, or radically reinterpreting them to come up with new insights.

Gino uses a dramatic example: the forced landing of a US Airways airliner on the Hudson River in 2009, which made headlines around the world. The pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, became an instant hero thanks to his skill and his ability to stay cool in a crisis. He was able to see that landing on the river offered the best chance of survival for his passengers and crew.

Sometimes, a form of tunnel vision leaves us blind to alternative possibilities. Because we've always done something in a certain way, according to a clear set of rules, we can't see any other way of doing it. A pilot with this kind of tunnel vision might have tried to reach one of the alternative runways offered to him, with potentially disastrous results.

The fourth key characteristic is diversity. This is the ability to challenge stereotypes of both race and gender, and seek out viewpoints that are different from our own.

Ava DuVernay is the African-American, female director of the Oscar-nominated movie "Selma." Before getting her big break, she encountered the downside of an industry that lacked a commitment to diversity. So, once she'd made it, she was determined to bring a more diverse approach into the industry.

She created a television series called "Queen Sugar" and decided to hire only female directors for each of the episodes. She also started a blog that highlights the work of African-American filmmakers. Importantly, it focuses on the technical aspects of their work and their talent, without dwelling on their ethnicity.

Gino relates how DuVernay was on the receiving end of this approach when she went for an interview at Disney. The two executives she met admired her work, and that became the focus of the interview, not her background. As a result, she was able to give her full attention to discussing the creative process, and she convinced them she was the ideal candidate for the job.

The benefits of encouraging diversity are well established, but it doesn't hurt to read compelling real-life examples that prove the point. Gino reminds us that diverse workplaces tend to be more profitable and to retain staff more easily. They're also more likely to encourage creativity and collaboration.

Gino's fifth and final characteristic of rebel talent is authenticity. This involves being true to your own values. If you're honest and open with others, you can connect with them more easily.

Focusing on your core values also allows you to discover your internal strengths, and to pinpoint what you're actually good at. Here, Gino takes a swipe at performance reviews that focus on weaknesses, rather than strengths.

In annual reviews, people are often asked to list both their strengths and their weaknesses, but the action points from the meeting usually address the weaknesses only. She believes that reinforcing success is a more authentic approach, which delivers better results than trying to drag weaknesses up to a comparable standard.

Sometimes, being authentic can be difficult. This is particularly true in situations where your values tell you to speak out against groupthink or unethical behavior. Not everyone will be comfortable with these difficult conversations. But, as the author notes in Chapter Two, when she shares her experiences of improv, comfort is sometimes overrated. It doesn't always make us as happy as we think it will.

So how does a manager combine the five characteristics of rebel talent to become a rebel leader? How do you encourage people to give their best while questioning the rules? And how do you ensure that your people are happy and fulfilled in their work?

The final two chapters of the book tell you how. Chapter Seven explains how being truly engaged in what you do can transform how you work and think. It examines the power of creative conflict, and the value of switching up an established narrative with elements of surprise.

In fact, engagement is what draws the threads of novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity, and authenticity together. Rebels engage with what they do, and seek to engage others with it. And people tend to be happier in their work when they are engaged.

But not everyone finds engagement easy. Think of call center workers and flight attendants, who often read from standard scripts, many times a day. The Gallup organization conducts regular research on employee engagement, and in 2016 it found that only 32 percent of American employees felt engaged with their work. Clearly, rebel managers need strategies to get their people on board.

According to Gino, there are eight of these strategies, and they form the core practice of a rebel leader. Let's look at a few of them in detail.

For a start, rebel leaders seek out the new. They have relentless curiosity. They explore what interests their people and see where it takes them. They remind themselves that there may be other ways of doing things, and make sure their people know that, too. This lies at the heart of getting them engaged in what they do – and engagement, as you've heard, lies at the heart of the rebel mindset.

How leaders communicate their vision is also vital. They keep conversations open and don't close them off with judgmental language. They keep discussions moving by saying, "What if?" from time to time. This is a great way to stimulate further ideas.

Discussion should always challenge assumptions. Rebel leaders encourage constructive dissent, which Gino sees as a vital part of the creative process. One company she profiles uses devil's advocates to challenge and test ideas in product development meetings. This increases the robustness of the final product.

Encouraging dissent may sound limiting for the leader, but a true rebel finds freedom in constraints. This may seem contradictory, but having limitations placed upon you can make you think more creatively. For instance, a tight schedule or budget may force you to look for new and better ways of tackling a project.

Rebel leaders, Gino says, reveal themselves, and reach out to others. They inspire trust by showing who they really are, and what they believe in. Like Napoleon, they lead from the trenches. Rebel leaders show that they're on the front line with their staff, and willing to learn directly from their input and experience.

This openness helps to foster a team culture in which people with different skills can share ideas. Encouraging hot-desking, for example, can open up fruitful conversations between members of different teams. Allowing team members to experience a range of different roles can also bring unexpected benefits.

The book concludes with chef Massimo Bottura (the author's paragon of rebel talent) and his response to the earthquakes that devastated the Emilio-Romagna region of Italy in 2012. Local cheese manufacturers faced ruin, as warehouses were destroyed and huge amounts of cheese were left damaged and unsaleable.

Bottura devised a one-off recipe that would use the broken cheese, and promoted it online as a way to help save the industry. It worked – the stocks of damaged cheese were all sold.

Bottura led from the front, thought differently about a situation, and made something new and valuable from an apparent disaster. A classic rebel leader.

"Rebel Talent" is an engaging and fast-moving read, with a wealth of case studies to illustrate the author's points. The people she describes are often fascinating, as are the examples she shares from her own life.

But despite this, the sheer volume of examples is part of the book's problem. Gino seems determined to pull almost everyone who demonstrates creativity, authenticity and vision into the category of "rebel talent."

It's worth remembering that Napoleon, for all his genius, spent his life subject to military discipline. And Captain Sullenberger was working his way through a strict emergency procedures checklist when he put that airplane down in the Hudson. His decision was surely driven as much by necessity as it was by improvisational genius.

Readers may also get the sense that they've read some of this before. Many of the book's examples are novel, but some prominent ones are regular fixtures in other works on creativity and leadership. The book suggests that the characteristics of rebel talent underpin all engagement and creativity, but despite a wealth of material, it doesn't quite make that case.

"Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life," by Francesca Gino, is published by Dey Street Books.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.