When attending Ivy league schools like The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, students are guaranteed to have professors with impressive resumes leading lectures and projects. One such professor at Wharton is Adam Grant, 34, who is a New York Times best-selling author as well as the youngest tenured professor at the renowned business school.
According to his bio on the Wharton website, Grant has been recognized as Wharton’s top-rated teacher for five straight years, as well as one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers, the 100 most creative people in business, the top 40 business professors under 40, HR’s most influential international thinkers, and Malcolm Gladwell’s favorite thinkers.
As you can see by his resume, Grant is something of a modern renaissance man. He has accomplished great things in academics, research, writing, teaching, speaking, consulting, and leadership.
Education and Academics
Grant is one smart cookie. He received his B.A. from Harvard University, earning magna cum laude with highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa honors, and the John Harvard Scholarship for highest academic achievement. In grad school, he received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Michigan in organizational psychology, a degree he attained in less than three years.
At Wharton, Grant was granted tenure while still in his twenties — a feat never before accomplished at the storied business school. Before graduate school, he worked at Let’s Go Publications, where he set multiple company records for advertising sales and earned the Manager of the Year award. He has been honored with the Excellence in Teaching Award for all of his classes and earned the Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty MBA Teaching Award.
Published Research
Grant has had plenty of research published as well. His research has focused on generosity, motivation and meaningful work, championing new ideas, personality traits like introversion-extraversion, and leadership, collaboration, culture, and organizational change.
He has published more than 60 articles in a wide range of leading management and psychology journals, some of which include: “When Job Performance is All Relative: How Family Motivation Energizes Effort and Compensates for Intrinsic Motivation”, “Making a difference matters: Impact unlocks the emotional benefits of prosocial spending”, “Unanswered questions about public service motivation: Designing research to address key issues of emergence and effects” and “The dynamics of proactivity at work.”
Grant has earned several awards for his scholarly achievement, including the Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award for early-to-mid-career contributions from the Academy of Management, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution from the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award and the Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the best publication in the field from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and a fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Grant is a contributing op-ed writer on work and psychology for the New York Times, where his articles on raising a moral child and how to raise a creative child have each been shared more than 300,000 times on social media.
Books and Press
Grant has authored two New York Times bestselling books, which have been translated into 34 languages. His first book, “Give and Take”, is about why helping others drives our success. It was named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His second literary effort, “Originals”, focused on how individuals champion new ideas and leaders fight groupthink. It became a #1 national bestseller and one of Amazon’s best books of February 2016.
Grant has been profiled on the Today Show and in the New York Times Magazine. His studies have been highlighted in books by Susan Cain, Daniel Pink, Arianna Huffington, Nicholas Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn, and Malcolm Gladwell.
And Everything In Between
Grant is an accomplished public motivational speaker. Grant hosted a TED talk on what it takes to be original in 2016 and was voted the audience’s favorite speaker at The Nantucket Project on the success of givers and takers. He has spoken in front of employees at companies like Google, the NBA, Merck, Goldman Sachs, Disney Pixar, Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, BCG, Amex, the United Nations, the U.S. Army and Navy, and the World Economic Forum, where he has been honored as a Young Global Leader.
Check out his TED talk below:
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Grant is the founder and host of the Authors@Wharton speaker series, and co-director of Wharton People Analytics. He has designed experiential learning activities based on The Apprentice where students have raised more than $325,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He is a former junior Olympic springboard diver and performed for over a decade as a magician. He serves on the Lean In board and authored a New York Times series on women and work with Sheryl Sandberg, including speaking while female and Madam C.E.O., get me a coffee.