The Power of Curiosity

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, shares a compelling business case for curiosity. Her research shows allowing employees to exercise their curiosity can lead to fewer conflicts and better outcomes. However, even managers who value inquisitive thinking often discourage curiosity in the workplace because they fear it's inefficient and unproductive. Gino offers several ways that leaders can instead model, cultivate, and even recruit for curiosity. Gino is the author of the HBR article "The Business Case for Curiosity."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Looking for a good book? Pick up your next business read during HBR Cyber Monday sale.
0:06.0	Head to store.HBR.org and use promo code cyber23 to save big on HBR books, tools, curated collections and more. That's store.
0:16.6	HBR.org. Happy shopping. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nicketh. In 2011, a 14-year-old Chinese-American girl named Clara Ma walked into a high-tech laboratory in California.
0:55.0	She was wearing a white outfit with a mask and gloves to protect against contamination.
1:00.7	Then she leaned over a piece of space- machinery costing 2.5 billion dollars and she pulled out a permanent pen.
1:08.0	I signed my name in English and I just I decided to sign it in Chinese as well in Mandarin and I just I decided in Chinese as well in Mandarin and I also wrote the word
1:15.7	curiosity curiosity the name of NASA's third Mars rover Clara had the honor of
1:22.2	signing the rover because she had suggested that name in an essay contest when she was 11 years old.
1:28.0	The picture of curiosity that I had when I was a kid was just one that involved asking a lot of questions. I'm an extremely
1:36.3	extremely inquisitive person like people will get annoyed with me for how many
1:39.5	questions that I ask. The human trade of curiosity is universal in children, but it's less common
1:46.1	in adults and often hard to find in the workplace. The fear being that curiosity can cripple your career by leading you out of line.
1:55.0	However, new research shows that curiosity can drive an organization's performance.
2:01.0	It improves engagement in collaboration and inspires novel solutions.
2:05.0	Here to talk about the performance power of curiosity and what managers can do to bolster it is Francesca Geno.
2:12.0	She's a professor at Harvard Business School and the
2:15.4	author of the article The Business Case for Curiosity. It's in the September October 2018
2:21.1	issue of Harvard Business Review.
2:23.0	Francesca, thanks so much for coming on the show.
2:25.4	Thank you for having me.
2:26.8	It's a pleasure to be here. Why are children so good at curiosity? We are all born with a lot of curiosity. We are all born with a lot of curiosity and in fact if you look at the data
2:45.6	curiosity peaks at the age four and five but then unfortunately declines steadily
	...

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