In Fall 2016, I was a student in Professor Adam Grant’s class. I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Junior at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. The class was called “Management 238 - Organizational Behavior.”
As there are a couple of million of his fans out there on the internet, I thought you might be curious to know what his class was actually like. Was Adam (we called him by his first name) a good teacher? Was he interesting? And did I actually learn anything in his class? I’m going to spill all the tea on the world’s favorite organizational psychologist. As someone who feels basically neutral and indifferent towards him and his platform now, I will give my honest account.
How did I get into his class?
Adam was already incredibly famous in the early years of my Wharton undergraduate degree. He would have been 35 at the time, which now that I am 30 sounds extremely young. I believe I was there during the period when he won Wharton’s Top Rated Professor seven years in a row. Specifically, he received the Class of 1986 award, which goes to the professor with the highest average rating by MBA students.
Expectations were high, and the competition to get into his class was fierce. Like many of the oversubscribed classes at Penn, his class had an application to get in, which took me at least a couple of hours to complete. I would share what questions were on that application, but I honestly can’t find my answers to them. He only accepted Juniors and Seniors into his class, and while I don’t remember if there was a waitlist, rejected Junior hopefuls could definitely try again the next year, if their egos weren’t too bruised in the process.
Of course, I didn’t read the instructions, so I first applied to his course as an extremely keen Sophomore. I believe that put me on his radar, because one thing I will mention is that Adam NEVER forgets anyone’s name. More on that later. Therefore, I’m sure by the time I reapplied during my Junior year, he was aware of who I was.
What was Adam’s class like?
I took his class almost 10 years ago, so I think this is as appropriate a time as any to see if I remember anything from it.
I remember one extremely important thing about motivation. When researchers surveyed managers, what the managers expected employees cared about the most was actually the opposite of what the employees cared about. I believe that employees most cared about appreciation (i.e., their manager expressing that they were grateful for their work), feeling “in on things” (i.e., their manager giving them relevant company context so they knew what was going on on the team), and I think the other ones were like autonomy or having a manager who takes their opinion on board. Meanwhile, the managers thought that money and awards motivated their employees the most. Doh! So while the sources are a blur in my memory, that’s a pretty important finding that I still remember and use every day in my work life, especially now that I have an assistant.
We did some Harvard Business School case studies in the class, especially one that was a metaphor about the 1986 Challenger disaster (a story that seemed to have impacted Adam, who was a kid at the time). That case study taught me that it’s very important to get input and combine information from everyone on a team when you’re trying to make decisions or build something together. You especially need input from the quiet people in the room.
I also learned about maximizers versus satisficers, and I believe Professor Barry Schwartz himself (see below) came to campus and spoke to us, which was cool. From a jam experiment he did, he found that if you offer people more than six types of jam on a table in the grocery store, they would be struck with decision paralysis and end up purchasing less jam. Such are the very useful things that I learned at the Wharton School.
A couple other details about Adam is that he was absolutely obsessed with Seinfeld and made references to it in pretty much every class. He also would always invite us to office hours to help people sort out their lives, as he was determined to help students develop their other passions and interests so they wouldn’t become bankers and consultants. Unfortunately, I’m not sure he was particularly successful at that (though that was more the fault of Wharton’s culture than his). And I remember feeling consistently not smart in his class, as I fell for all the tricks he tested us with, including the gorilla test; I was too distracted and counting the number of times they passed the ball!
Looking back now, without checking the slides from class, I did learn a lot of useful things in Adam Grant’s class. I’m quite grateful to still remember them now.
What was Adam like as a teacher?
Despite his extreme busyness and fame, Adam was a surprisingly attentive teacher. His class had a lot of extra bells and whistles that other classes didn’t, like MBA mentors to help us Undergrads connect with a real adult human professional. I just remembered that at the beginning of the class, he took all his students and MBA mentors to Dave and Busters in Philadelphia. As an international student, I had never been before, so it was a cool experience. I remember eating a fancy sushi lunch with him and some students at Pod one time, but I don’t remember why we were there. Adam also answered a ridiculous, gargantuan amount of emails from us all the time. He made it seem like he was always accessible to his students. If I remember correctly, he told us that his order of priorities in his life was: 1. His family. 2. His students. 3. Everything else.
Other Wharton professors did not give us that special level of attention and care. Even though Adam was on book tours, and flying around everywhere, he still made us feel like we mattered to him, and genuinely did his best to teach us the most important insights from researchers on management. Sometimes, the number of management studies he was quoting could get overwhelming, so in the feedback we gave at the end of the class, I suggested we have more time in class to write silent reflections on what we were learning, to help us learn better. Still, the fact that I remember quite a bit from his class is a testament to the value of what he taught me; I don’t even remember a single thing I learned in many of my core Wharton Finance or Accounting classes or who the professor was, for example.
What was Adam like as a person?
In many other aspects of his personality, Adam was like a machine. I think the politically correct way of saying it these days is “neurodivergent” or “neuro-spicy.” To his credit, he is a freaking genius. What I think he did best of all was realize his own talent for memorization and apply himself to an area of the world that he found interesting. Advantageously, that’s also incredibly profitable, because everyone wants advice from Wharton’s top professor on how to run their company. One thing that I thought was also funny and interesting is that Adam would often joke about how he disliked his few years of having a corporate job so much that he went to the University of Michigan to do a PhD (which he completed in like 3 years?) so that he could become a tenured professor and never have the possibility of being fired ever again. Of course, it’s ironic to me that his job was at some level to advise companies on how to run themselves, when he himself has so little corporate job experience.
The lengths Adam has gone to learn things like good storytelling, often through memorization and constant, religious dedication to improvement, is just astounding. In his class, he often told stories of how he got better at things, like how he became a top diver in high school, and how he learned to ace his TV interviews after a few extremely embarrassing times being on air, of which he showed us the video clips. He is amazing in that sense. I remember I even asked him one time if he posted automated Tweets, and he said he didn’t; he just sat down at the same time every morning and posted something. He made everything sound so easy.
But of course, having a brain like Adam’s comes with drawbacks. I remember he once wrote an article in the New York Times about procrastination, because he was a chronic pre-crastinator (constantly getting everything done before the deadline), yet had learned that procrastination was good for creativity. He then tried to force himself to procrastinate. It’s that kind of stuff: he did teach me how our brains are adaptive and can improve over time when we dedicate ourselves to learning, and in some ways, his brain had to do three roundabout steps to accomplish something that less intelligent humans like myself do naturally.
To Adam’s credit, he was always very aware of his privilege as a straight, white male and very empathetic. He always went out of his way to quote female and minority voices when it came to research papers, thought leaders, and recent findings, so that was a nice part of being in his class. He even dedicated posts and shared condolences in the New York Times to celebrate the life and work of his Wharton colleague, Professor Sigal Barsade, the mother of a friend of mine, who tragically died young from a brain tumor.
How did I know Adam was “neuro-spicy”?
Trust me. That man remembers EVERYTHING. Basically, every email he has ever received and sent. Every person he’s ever met. And perhaps most importantly, he remembered every single title, author, and date of almost any peer-reviewed paper of Management or Organizational Psychology ever written. His memory was just off the charts. I wouldn’t be surprised if he remembered that I was consistently 5 minutes late to his class with my bowl of oatmeal that had raisins, apple, banana, and walnuts in it. That honestly wouldn’t surprise me at all. But imagine how much of an advantage that puts him at, in terms of his studies, his job, and his life? Imagine learning something once and then remembering it forever? I believe that’s a huge part of why he’s excelled as much as he has today.
What other privileges did Adam Grant’s class come with?
Here is the full list of famous people I inadvertently brushed shoulders with because of Adam’s class:
- Tim Urban, the creator of Wait But Why. I believe that Tim and Adam were actually friends (or even roommates) at Harvard College for their undergraduate degrees. When Adam would write and submit his senior thesis months before the deadline, Tim Urban would procrastinate until the very last minute, and thus, Tim coined one of his most famous articles about the procrastination monkey.
- Esther Perel, the world-famous relationship psychologist, who came to give a talk in 2017 for her book tour during the release of The State of Affairs. Before Adam hosted that discussion with her, I had never heard of her, though I obviously have now.
- Professor Barry Schwartz, a world-renowned psychologist and researcher, focused on “The Paradox of Choice”, who drove in from Swarthmore College. He was kind and old, and I remember him talking about being a satisficer when it came to marrying his wife years ago, and how satisficers are happier despite choosing worse outcomes than maximizers.
- Sheryl Sandberg, the leaning-in girl boss COO of Meta. We did not actually meet her, but our class did talk to her on the phone with Adam one morning, years before her now infamous status. Her husband, Dave, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, had recently died, and Adam wrote a book with Sheryl called Option B. Sheryl then did a big talk in an auditorium at Penn, which Adam hosted.
- Joseph Ansanelli, the CEO of Gladly. His vibe was a successful Wharton Grad VC turned CEO for fun from the Bay Area.
- Adam name dropped people infrequently, including the Warby Parker founders who were previously his students, who he regrettably didn’t invest in despite their offer.
What other gossip do I have?
There were a couple of things that left a sour taste in my mouth after Adam’s class. The cult of personality around him just led to everyone sucking up to him constantly, which I found kind of annoying. With my classmates in particular, the problem was that Adam’s class tended to attract even the extra overachieving Wharton students. After the class, we got to join a class alumni group called “The 238 Society,” which I guess I will be a part of for the rest of my life. Maybe I’m resentful because I just am consistently let down by how many of my classmates have chosen to spend their lives doing extremely boring 9-5 banking and consulting jobs out there, and never finding out what they’re passionate about. That’s obviously a me-thing.
Of course, the people highest and nearest and dearest to this guru were the PhD students who chose to dedicate themselves to Adam’s field. Nerding out about those kinds of papers was the equivalent of drinking the Kool-Aid. Good for them, but that was not going to be me.
Final Thoughts
For my last point, I want to leave an invitation for Adam himself, in case he ever reads this. It’s clear to me that once someone has a certain level of fame, power, and notoriety, everything becomes very political very quickly. As I mentioned before, 10 years ago, when I was in Adam’s class, he was buddy-buddy with Sheryl Sandberg. And now, with the state of the world and Meta and everything, her reputation isn’t nearly what it used to be. It seems Adam has since distanced himself from her quite a bit (or at least they’re not collaborating on books anymore), and his reputation might have been negatively affected if he continued to be associated with her.
Of course, this unsolicited advice is all a bit rich coming from me, because I am not in that stratosphere of fame. I have no idea what it might be like, but I can see why he’s got such a short Wikipedia page. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hired some risk management company to help him figure out his reputation, and when it comes to who knows what about you, the less we know, the better.
However, given Adam’s interesting position, I invite him to try to do more for the world. He’s young still, and he’s an excellent academic and an organizational behavior specialist; we all know that. But I don’t think maybe he’s aware of or ever expected to have as much power as he has. And beyond being a kid from Michigan who grew up trying to get good grades, now that he is a world leader, I think a role like that comes with a certain amount of telling people uncomfortable truths and challenging the power structure of billionaires that be. When you’re that famous and that many people are looking up to you, I believe, you need to stand for something, or maybe even stand up for people who don’t have the same power or resources as you do. It’s kind of a moral obligation. Because not doing something, being a passive bystander, is also doing something.
Maybe my expectations are misplaced, and I, too, am getting sucked into the cult of personality around Adam, and expecting this human person to solve more of our problems. But from my experience of being in Adam’s class, he likes it when people like him, and I wonder if that is hindering the positive impact on the world that he could be having. Adam, if you’re reading this, I offer you my favorite quote from Maya Angelou:
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
