Weird Ideas that work

In Weird Ideas That Work, Stanford University professor Robert Sutton draws on extensive psychological research to explain how innovation can be fostered in hiring, managing, and motivating people, in building teams, making decisions and interacting with outsiders. These eleven and a half ideas will inspire and force you to blow the dust off tried and tested methods and take the more challenging path instead.

Robert Sutton's bold ideas may appear scary on first inspection, as you are encouraged to challenge and confront old patterns. Creativity and innovation are quashed by routine and habit and Robert Sutton discourages the safety and uniformity of conventional corporate culture.

Business practices like 'hire people who make you uncomfortable,' 'reward success and failure, but punish inaction,' and 'decide to do something that will probably fail, and then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain' strike many managers as strange or even downright wrong. Yet "Weird Ideas That Work" shows how some of the best teams and companies use these and other counterintuitive practices to crank out new ideas, and it demonstrates that every company can reap sales and profits from such creativity.

Author of "Knowing-Doing Gap", Sutton bases this work on a mix of psychological and management theory is filled with examples from different sizes and types of industry – this book is a breakthrough in management thinking.