The Real Cost of Misinformation on Human Flourishing and Leadership Choices with Alex Edmans

Ashish Kothari:

Hi Alex, I am so excited that you decided to join us one week after your new baby arrived in the world to share your insights with us. Thank you.

Alex Edmans:

You're very welcome, Ashish. It's really great to be back on your podcast.

Ashish Kothari:

So Alex, I read your book May Contain Lies, back to back, so many times. And really, I think this conversation is such an important one because in this whole space of well-being, flourishing, and happiness, there are so many people who take individual stories and paint them as “this is the answer that will change your life.”

You provide such a powerful approach, just like you do with your prior book, Grow the Pie, where any person can look beyond what we want to be true. I think this will be rich with insight for people and hopefully prevent a lot of harm when people just buy into these policies.

So to start, why do you think it is so important to rethink how we believe what we come to believe? Talk a little bit about that.

Alex Edmans:

This is because there's so much information out there. Nowadays you can get information from almost every source. When I was a kid, there were only a certain number of sources. If you wanted to find out about something, you'd go to the library and look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or if you wanted health advice, you'd make an appointment to see a doctor.

Now, you can get information from anywhere. Internet gurus and Instagram celebrities will liberally dispense health advice. You can get information on issues like workplace happiness not only from leading CEOs or professors who've conducted scientific research, but from anybody who gets a platform and says something that sounds good.

These are really important topics. Yes, I'm an academic and I like to ensure that things are accurate, but this is not just for academic reasons. It's for entirely practical reasons. Just like in a medical setting you want to make sure a drug is safe before taking it, any company wanting to improve workplace well-being needs to ensure that it's more than just gut feel or shooting from the hip if they're trying to make a workplace intervention.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and I think there’s nothing that spoke to me more than when I saw your lecture on YouTube, where you opened it with your story about breastfeeding and what you found out when your first baby was born—and how people buy into that. Can you share that story, Alex? It’s so powerful in terms of the daily application of not believing everything to be true.

Alex Edmans:

Thank you, and I really appreciate you asking about that example because it just hammers home how real and important this topic of misinformation is. Before my first child was born, we took an antenatal course, the National Childbirth Trust course, which is the most respected in the UK. Much of it was excellent, so I really don’t want to criticize it, but there was a part of it on breastfeeding.

Some of that module was about how to breastfeed and how to ensure a good latch. But they started by discussing why to breastfeed. This makes sense because breastfeeding is tough. If you’re an exhausted parent, you might think, let’s just give up and reach for the bottle because it’s easier. So if they can convince you of the benefits of breastfeeding, you might persevere.

They looked at a variety of studies published in top scientific journals linking breastfeeding to many positive outcomes, physical outcomes like reduced allergies and better physical health for the child, improved recovery for the mother, and mental outcomes like higher IQ for the child. This is why the World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months. And by “exclusive,” they mean no formula, nothing else.

So my wife and I were convinced by the evidence, and that’s what we planned. But as a very famous breastfeeding consultant told us—Mike Tyson is his name—he said, “Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face.” Being punched in the face for us was that breastfeeding didn’t always work. Even though we did get a good latch, after our son drained my wife dry, he was still hungry.

So what do you do? You might think, I’ve got to feed a hungry baby, but then think, No, the World Health Organization says don’t give anything other than breast milk. So I went back to the evidence and looked much more deeply.

What I realized was that even though there was a strong correlation between breastfeeding and, say, IQ, this was not causation. Why? Because whether a mother breastfeeds or not isn’t random—it depends on other circumstances. Maybe the mothers who are able to breastfeed are the ones with family support. They might have a supportive partner at home, a nanny, or a housekeeper. So it might be those other factors—not just the breast milk—that are behind the higher IQ.

So when you control for those other factors, meaning when you strip out the effect of things like parental background, you find no link between breastfeeding and IQ, or many of the other outcomes like health.

Why is that so important? Yes, we all know the phrase “correlation is not causation.” We think it’s an academic disclaimer, but it has real implications for how we raise our children. The message that you’re a bad mother unless you exclusively breastfeed guilt-trips mothers into doing so, even if they’re exhausted.

One reader of my book wrote to me saying she was in tears when she read this chapter. She’s expecting her first child and was told by the hospital—linked to an Ivy League university—that they wouldn’t support her decision to bottle feed. But she can’t breastfeed because she has no breasts. She had breast cancer and a double mastectomy.

They were putting this woman through so much shame when it was entirely out of her control—saying they would only give resources to breastfeeding parents. After reading that chapter in my book, she burst into tears because she had been put through all of that shame for nothing.

Ashish Kothari:

Both of those stories are such powerful examples of real-life implications. And you can see this pattern across so many things—diets, breastfeeding. There’s shame, guilt, and frankly, harm. Not feeding a hungry baby is likely worse for the baby and for the parents’ emotional and mental health as the baby cries nonstop.

But there we are. Even from the most leading organizations, we can’t just take a statement to be fact. We’ve got to do some work around it.

Alex Edmans:

Yeah. People like to dispense black-and-white advice because the more clear-cut it is, the easier it is to latch onto. You can tweet it in 280 characters—exclusively breastfeed, blueberries are the secret to long life, never drink white wine. Those are easy to implement. But these black-and-white rules ignore the complexity and nuance of life.

As you’re saying, with breastfeeding, there are many other considerations. If your baby is hungry, you need to feed them. And in terms of communication, babies want to learn that when they express hunger, their parents will respond. If you don’t respond to such cues, they may not trust others later in life and might not communicate their needs—they might just take things for themselves.

Also, the “World Health Organization”—the key word there is world. They need to give advice applicable globally. In some countries, you can’t safely prepare formulas. Maybe you don’t have electricity to boil water, or the water supply isn’t clean. But in the UK, maybe those concerns aren’t as strong.

It’s not necessarily the fault of these organizations. Sometimes they do need to keep things simple. But we need to ask: Is that simple rule of thumb applicable to my situation? Sometimes it might be. Sometimes it won’t. What I’m trying to encourage with the book is critical thinking—not one-size-fits-all advice.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, no, I love it, Alex. And I think the way it’s playing out in the whole space of flourishing and well-being... That’s why I strongly believe teams should decide the interventions. We should give them a whole range of what works and let them experiment and try, because teams are unique, just like humans are unique.

One of the things I rally against is one-size-fits-all, top-down programs that companies run, where it’s mandatory for everyone to go through it. Yes, there might be strong research showing that psychological safety works, but it might not work in all contexts.

If I give you 100 hours of work to be done in 40, maybe addressing that before psychological safety might help performance more. So I love this notion of moving away from black-and-white, one-size-fits-all approaches.

You also highlight a second bias we fall into—confirmation bias. Talk a little bit about that.

Alex Edmans:

Yeah, so confirmation bias is the idea that we have a view of the world, and if we see something that confirms that viewpoint, we lap it up uncritically and don't question it. In terms of breastfeeding, you might think, why didn’t I challenge this as soon as I heard it from the National Childbirth Trust course? I’m a professor of finance—I should understand data and statistics and the difference between correlation and causation.

Well, it's because I had a bias. And you might think, do I really have a bias? We assume we have biases about emotive issues like climate change, immigration, abortion, or gun control. But do I really have a bias about breastfeeding? And I did. It was a small bias, but still a bias. The bias was that I was brought up believing that something natural is better than something man made. We learn that natural flavorings are better than artificial flavorings.

Ashish Kothari:

Yes.

Alex Edmans:

So when people said "natural breast milk," which has evolved over centuries, millennia, I thought it must be better than something formulated artificially by machines. And that’s why I didn’t question it.

This applies to many issues, like workplace well-being. We like to believe that humble leaders are better leaders. We want to believe that leaders eat last. Why? Because we believe humility is a desirable trait. We want the good guys—or the good women—to win.

But in some situations, it might be that you don’t want humble leaders. You want someone who gives clear direction and leads from the front in particular situations. So maybe, while humble leadership may work well in some contexts, dictatorial leaders might be more effective in others—leaders who don't make every decision by committee or who don’t cater to every concern in the name of psychological safety. They might listen, then say, "I’ve heard your concerns, and I don’t think they’re relevant here. I’m going to move ahead."

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, I love that. And the confirmation bias—you open your book with the story of Belle and talk about how we make celebrities out of people, often just because of this social media TikTok movement. We want to believe stories of how someone made a ton of money or changed their life. Huge groups end up changing their behavior—dropping medicine—because of stories like Belle’s, a story of cancer she never had.

In corporate terms, you also highlight the story of Elizabeth Holmes and how easily we believe. We want a female founder, a dropout, to win. So we just forget—there were so many smart people involved in Theranos, and nobody saw it.

Alex Edmans:

Yes, and again, it's because we want these things to be true. Confirmation bias is strong. Belle Gibson was just an Instagram influencer who claimed to have cancer and said she defeated it by ditching chemotherapy and radiotherapy and switching to clean eating.

That supports what we want to believe—that the secret to health is fruit and vegetables, not cisplatin or drugs from chemotherapy companies. But she was nothing more than an Instagram blogger. People took her advice over their oncologist’s. In at least one case, someone died because they stopped chemotherapy.

With Elizabeth Holmes, again, she was a charismatic visionary, described as the female Steve Jobs. She even dressed like Steve Jobs. And people who had built their careers on being extremely discerning—like George Shultz, the former U.S. Secretary of State—didn’t question it. They poured money into it. Why? Because they liked the story of a visionary inventing a machine that could diagnose dozens of diseases from a single pinprick of blood. They wanted it to be true.

Another person I discuss in the book is Simon Sinek. We've already talked about the idea of leaders eating last—how great leaders make you feel safe. His most famous TED Talk led to the book Start With Why, which argues that having a purpose is the secret to success.

Again, we want that to be true. We tell kids, “You can do anything you put your mind to. Just dream big.” That suggests the world is your oyster. You're not limited by ability—just dream hard enough. But the evidence for what he says is extremely weak. He cherry-picks a few cases.

He argues that Steve Jobs was successful because he “started with why.” He says people don't buy Apple products because of what they do—they buy why they do it. No—I buy Apple products because they work. They're functional. They have apps. I bought an Apple Watch because it’s portable. I don’t know what the “why” was—and I don’t care.

So the idea that “starting with why” is the secret to success—it’s not backed by data. There are many other potential explanations for Apple’s success. Simon Sinek was neither a CEO nor a founder. He wasn't a business school professor studying what drives success. He was a former advertising executive.

And just like advertising is good at marketing something simple, he created his “Golden Circle” model—unsupported by data—and preached it. Unfortunately, millions around the world buy his books, watch his talks, and run their companies based on this.

Now, you might think I’m being too harsh. Does it really matter if people believe in purpose, even if the evidence is weak? Isn’t it still good to have a purpose?

The issue is that companies start putting too much effort into purpose rather than doing the actual work. Like Ben & Jerry’s, for example, claims their purpose is that ice cream can change the world. Instead of just doing marketing about purpose, if they actually reduced the caloric content of their ice cream, maybe the world would be better off in terms of global obesity.

So yes—if purpose comes for free and doesn’t affect how a company is run, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. But these things aren’t free. People have limited time and resources. If you distract them with things that might not matter much, you reduce the resources available for what actually does matter.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. And that’s why this is so important, Alex. So often—I’ll give you an example. I was working with a pharmaceutical client, and they were struggling with stress and overwhelming workloads. The organization had to decide where to put its effort.

They could put that effort into various things. But instead, they focused on activating the “why”—reminding everyone of their purpose. It’s one of those classic examples: shouldn’t you restructure work? Rationalize teams? If people are overworked, shouldn’t you address that to improve performance?

Do we really need to spend so much time defining our purpose? By the way, this is a pharmaceutical company. They're literally making life-saving drugs. It’s a perfect example—yes, purpose is good if it came for free. In some situations, purpose matters. But we have to be discerning about when to pull that lever, and when other levers would help more in helping your people flourish.

Alex Edmans:

Absolutely, but that would not be a good message for Simon Sinek—that purpose matters sometimes, not others. He wants to say, “This is the secret to success.” What he claims in his book is really egregious. He says everybody—everybody—who is highly successful thinks in exactly the same way, and that way is completely different from how the rest of the world thinks. Basically, there’s one formula that every single successful person follows.

And everybody else is getting it wrong. But if that were the case, it would be obvious. If you weren’t succeeding, you’d just adopt that one thing, come up with a purpose, and you’d succeed.

In reality, people succeed in very different ways. Some musicians write ballads, others do rock or pop. Similarly, leadership styles vary—some are aggressive and dictatorial, others are humanitarian. Some succeed through innovation and thinking outside the box; others focus on stability. There are different approaches you can take.

Ashish Kothari:

Absolutely. The two other ones I’ve seen in the startup world that have a similar effect—I'm not sure if you’ve read them—are 10X Is Easier Than 2X, which says don’t just think about going from 3 million to 6 million, think about jumping to 50 million. That’s what’s going to make you successful.

You want to believe it. You want to believe that thinking 10X is going to lead to success. But maybe not in all cases. If you have a bad product, scaling it by 50X won’t help—you need to fix the product first.

Alex Edmans:

That’s interesting because other tech thinkers say the opposite. Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One says just get to one first. And people just spin narratives. I don’t know what the evidence for his work is, but people spin whatever narrative they want.

Ashish Kothari:

Yes!

You outline a powerful framework—four steps—and I’d love to explore each one. You say in your ladder of misinference:

“A statement is not a fact, a fact is not data, data is not evidence, and evidence is not proof.”

In your book, you share stories around each one, showing how we fall into these traps. Let’s start with “a statement is not a fact.” How did that come to life through powerful research?

Alex Edmans:

Certainly. This is the idea that we love to quote people without checking whether there’s any evidence behind their statements. In workplace well-being, for example, we often quote Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The implication is that companies should invest heavily in culture rather than strategy.

I would love to believe this—much of my work focuses on corporate culture, as we discussed last time—but there’s a problem. Peter Drucker never said it. It’s always attributed to him, but nobody ever checked if he actually said it. He didn’t.

And even if he did say it, that doesn’t make it gospel. Was there any evidence behind it? Just because Peter Drucker is a leading management thinker doesn’t give him license to say anything he wants without evidence.

Before using these phrases as dictums, look at the evidence. Is it really true that culture eats strategy for breakfast? Is it true that 10,000 hours is the secret to success? If you look at a book like The 10X Rule, the subtitle is “The only difference between success and failure.” So there is one thing—the only difference. If everybody does that one thing, they’ll magically have a 10X company.

Ashish Kothari:

Yes.

Alex Edmans:

And again, it's not clear at all whether there's any evidence behind what he’s claiming…

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and as I read your book, there are so many of my own stories and things that I believed to be true, that I've quoted, Alex, that now I am re-examining. And one of the biggest ones in your book that you opened up with was this 10,000 rule that we accept as a fact, right? By Malcolm Gladwell.

So talk a little bit about what you found about where it applies and where it doesn't apply, actually.

Alex Edmans:

Well, this is an embarrassing rule for me to admit to, because I believed it myself. So I had heard it, and I used to teach it to my students.

So what is the rule? That rule is the idea that you can be successful in almost anything as long as you are willing to work for 10,000 hours in it. And this plays into our confirmation bias. We learn that practice makes perfect.

And as a business school professor, I would tell my students in my last lecture, where I finished talking about finance and I look forward to life in general, “Say, well, you come to Wharton,” which is where I was teaching at the time, “and maybe your background was purely in marketing, but if you really want to become an investment banker or trader, just by immersing yourself in finance, you'll be able to do well.” Or maybe in the past, you might not have been a natural public speaker. But this is something where, if you are to invest a lot of effort into it, then you'll be successful.

And when I would say this, people just nod along as if this was a truth universally acknowledged. And they also wanted it to be true. It seemed an empowering and quite inspiring speech.

But then, if you look at the evidence behind it... First, the evidence that Malcolm Gladwell looks at is on violin players. So what leads to success in violin playing—where you're playing the same sheet music over and over again—and maybe practice does work, but it might not be useful in other environments.

And indeed, there’s other people—let’s say the book Range by David Epstein—which argues we don't want to just focus on one thing, we want to cross-fertilize from experiences in very different fields.

And then, even if you were to look narrowly at violin playing, what this book looked at, what the study looked at, was students today. And they asked them, “Well, how much did you practice 18 years ago?” So they were now about age 23. They said, “What was your practice from age five onwards?”

So here there's an issue of reverse causality. You can't remember how much you practiced when you were age five. People don’t even remember what they had for breakfast yesterday.

And so it could be that if you were successful now—you were a great violin player about to break into the Berlin Symphony Orchestra—you would say, “Yeah, I must have practiced a lot when I was young.” Whereas if you weren't so successful, you don't want to admit to yourself you put in a lot of practice and it was to no avail, so you'll say, “I didn't really practice much.”

So it's not that practice drives success. It's that success drives perceived practice.

And so, for something so quotes about the importance of practice, for a study that never measured practice to begin with—it just looked at people's recollections of practice—this is something which meant that that rule had very little foundation.

And again, you might think, just a bit like Simon says, do we really care whether this is true or not? Isn't the message of hard work a good message? That the ends justify the means—it doesn't matter if the work was scientifically accurate?

Well, again, it does. Why? Because it's not the case that the world is your oyster. There were people who followed Gladwell's rule. They gave up their careers to try to be a professional golf player, and they failed. And they not only failed, they injured themselves through repetitive practice.

And also, what Gladwell focuses on is the quantity of practice—“let’s get to 10,000”—rather than the quality of practice. And so, the latter is what actually matters much more than just simply putting the hours in.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. Look, I want to move on to the second one—data. Fact is not data. But before I go there, I want to share: friends, get a copy of the book.

There are two other things that are really quite relevant if you are working in the space of flourishing, company well-being, culture. One is on CEO pay and employee gap—CEO pay to employee pay gap—that Alex highlights. And the other one is on sleep and some of the work on Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Really, really powerful. I think it's important for us to examine our own biases—not necessarily buy everything on face value—but be nuanced about it.

And that's really what Alex highlights. It's not about throwing the theory out, but being nuanced and ensuring that that applies to you in your situation.

So let's get to the second rung of the ladder, so to say, which is: fact is not equal to data.

Alex Edmans:

Absolutely. So I've just criticized giving statements without anything to back it up—just say something like “culture eats strategy for breakfast” or “10X is the only difference between success or failure.”

Well, these books—these authors—are much smarter than that. Sometimes they will provide some facts to back themselves up.

So with Simon Sinek, he says, “Don't just take my word for it that purpose is the secret to success. Let me prove it to you by giving you some examples.”

Apple was successful, and it started with why. It had this purpose: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo.” Well, actually, Apple never said that. Nowhere can you find Apple saying this.

But let's say they did say that. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Wikipedia. They had a purpose, which was to democratize knowledge, and they have surpassed the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the world's fount of knowledge.

And the Wright brothers—they were also successful. They launched the first powered flight.

Now again, it’s not true. It’s not clear that they had a purpose. But let’s assume they did have a purpose. They have clearly been successful. But those are just cherry-picked, hand-selected examples.

There could be thousands of other companies or nonprofits or people who also started with why—and they failed.

But Simon Sinek will never tell you about them, because they just don’t support his thesis.

So even if the facts that you do see are correct, it's the facts that you don't see where all the action might be.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and I think the one piece that you highlight there, which is interesting, is even in that storytelling and facts, Walter Isaacson’s part of his description is: it’s all about the what and the how, right?

Again, it is all about the what and the how, and you highlight that in your book.

Built to Last falls under the same fallacy, this notion of taking a set, ignoring the rest, and highlighting that.

The third rung is: data is not evidence. So even if there is data, I think we have to be careful about treating that as evidence.

Talk to us a little bit about that. And in particular, you highlight this data mining and causation versus correlation that can actually be really important to examine.

Alex Edmans:

Yes, absolutely. So, you might think, “Okay, I understand the problem of cherry-picking one or two examples.” But let’s say we’ve got hundreds of examples, and we’re seeing the full picture, not just a selected sample. The issue is that there could still be multiple explanations. That’s the difference between data and evidence.

Evidence is something that allows you to draw a specific conclusion. Data, on the other hand, might support many explanations.

We’ve already discussed examples. With breastfeeding—does breastfeeding cause a higher IQ? Or is it that certain parents are able to breastfeed and their circumstances lead to a higher IQ? That’s an example of alternative explanations.

Or you have reverse causality, like in the violin example. Does 10,000 hours of practice lead to success? Or, if you are successful now, do you retrospectively say you practiced a lot when you were young?

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. The other example I want you to talk about is what you found around this notion of female founders. It’s a widely accepted belief that companies with female founders perform better. But you explore other holistic factors that could affect that. Share what you found.

Alex Edmans:

There’s a lot of research right now on diversity, and it’s an important topic in workplace well-being. It seems logical that diverse teams make better decisions. You’d expect a wider set of ideas and more thinking outside the box.

But diversity is far more than just gender. It includes background, country of origin, whether someone studied humanities or arts or science.

So to reduce somebody's complexity and humanity to just their gender is really, really narrow. But people do that because it’s easy. You can just look at the mix of men and women on a board. And if one has a greater mix, then it must be more diverse, and it might be better.

There are studies by the likes of McKinsey and BlackRock claiming that female-run companies or more diversity perform better. But this is data—it’s not evidence.

Is it correlation, or is it causation?

ok financial performance from: 2017

Or it could be an industry effect. Let’s take coal mining. It’s a male-dominated industry just because of the nature of the work. So there’s going to be a greater proportion of males in the workforce. And coal mining has done poorly—but that’s nothing to do with the lack of diversity. That’s just because it’s a difficult sector.

So there are lots of alternative explanations. And when you look at my own research on cognitive diversity—people actually thinking differently—you do find a link to performance. But because that's much harder to measure, people want the simple thing. They just want to count how many men and women there are to define diversity. That leads to a much more palatable result.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and I think that's what I found so powerful. Because Alex, I believe—again, we want to believe—and I believe diversity matters. But I think what you highlight so beautifully is we have to be granular about it.

Diversity is, first of all, not just about racial or gender diversity. What you're highlighting is that diversity is about cognitive diversity—the different perspectives we bring in.

And then second, even that is not enough. You highlight that just diversity doesn’t matter. What matters is inclusion. I can put a bunch of people together, but if I don’t create the right environment for those ideas—for them to belong, to share—it’s not going to necessarily make a difference.

So I love the nuanced way in which you’re inviting companies and leaders to really think about this topic rather than just check the box—“Yes, I now have a more diverse board, so everything is good.”

Alex Edmans:

Absolutely. So there are a couple of things here.

Firstly, diversity needs to be more than just demographic diversity. It should be cognitive diversity.

Secondly, as you say, you don’t just need diversity—even if diversity is holistically defined and you have diversity of thinking—you also need inclusion, so that those diverse thoughts actually surface.

Because if I think differently, I have to bury it—because I know that if I speak up, people will just not like it—then actually, diversity is negative. It’d be better for everybody to think the same way than for me to think differently but feel frustrated that I have to keep it to myself.

So yes, it’s easy to say, “The one secret to success is diversity.” But as we've established so far in our conversation, there are often multiple secrets to success.

So what we need is not just demographic diversity, but cognitive diversity. And not just cognitive diversity, but inclusion—a place where people are willing to express their different viewpoints.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, I want to go to this last one because I want to have enough time for solutions—for individuals and organizations—so they can check and make sure the actions they’re taking are really informed and will move them forward, not hurt them.

So your last rung of the ladder is: evidence is not proof. Talk a little bit about that, because that also applies so much to our daily lives right now.

Alex Edmans:

That’s the idea. Let’s say you’ve nailed evidence—you’ve nailed causation and not correlation—in one particular situation. That still might not apply in other settings.

For example, going back to breastfeeding. It may be that the World Health Organization concluded—correctly—that in a developing country, you want to breastfeed your kids rather than formula feed. But that might not be true in the US or the UK, where it's actually not so difficult to prepare formulas in clean conditions.

Or maybe even if the violin setting had nailed that practice makes perfect in violin playing, that might not mean practice makes perfect in other domains.

So again, we want to have a result. And even if that result was discovered in a narrow setting, we claim that it’s true and applicable to all settings. Why?

Because if you were to write a book—say, The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss—about how to be fit and healthy, but it only applies to 40-year-old women, that book won’t sell. “The 4-Hour Body for 40-Year-Old Women” won’t go far. But if you call it The 4-Hour Body for all, promise it’s universally applicable, you’ll get more people to buy it.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and in a very real way, it’s affecting our world. I was quite blown away by your example of Taylorism—how productivity principles from factory settings are now affecting policies like No Child Left Behind. Talk a little bit about that.

Alex Edmans:

Yes. So what is Taylorism?

In: 1912

And this should be something I would like—as a researcher, I’d love to use science and evidence to find the best way. So: how much coal should you shovel at one time? What’s the optimal size of a shovel? How long should you take breaks?

And they gave useful instructions as to how long breaks should be, for example.

Then people thought, “Let’s apply this outside manufacturing—let’s apply this to education.”

So this involved telling teachers exactly how to teach, what page to be on each day, the very best ways to teach phonics and reading. But that doesn’t work.

Different teachers have different styles. And different students have different learning challenges.

In manufacturing, one widget is exactly the same as any other widget. You want 10,000 identical widgets.

But kids are not widgets. Even though my daughter is just one week old, we can already tell she’s different in many ways from my son when he was one week old.

To say, “There’s one way to educate your kids”—that’s highly problematic. Even though scientific management worked in manufacturing, that doesn’t mean it will work in education.

So yes, scientific management mattered and worked in manufacturing. That does not mean it’s also going to work in education.

Ashish Kothari:

Absolutely. Yeah. I have a 15-year-old, and this struck home for me, Alex.

Earlier this summer—last summer—my wife read Grit, and we were like, “You have to read this book. This is going to be your path to success.” It’s all about grit.

Again, it’s another one of those ideas—passion and perseverance—and how we want to believe so badly that this is going to work in all settings.

I found that story quite powerful too—what you discovered. So share a little bit around Grit. And I think for those who are listening with kids, this is really, really important, friends. Because as parents, sometimes, in trying to help our kids, we may be unintentionally subjecting them to harm.

Alex Edmans:

Yeah, so this is a book by Angela Duckworth, who is a leading scientific researcher—unlike Simon Sinek. She gave a great TED Talk and a book accompanying it called Grit. The secret to success is grit, which she defines as passion and perseverance. Again, things that we believe to be true.

You might say it's a mix between Simon Sinek's ideas of purpose and Gladwell's idea of hard work, which is 10,000 hours. But again, she tries to support this with evidence. She looks at men and women who got into West Point, which is the United States Military Academy. Now, you get in, you're not yet qualified. You have to survive this course called Beast Barracks, which is a six-week challenge. It's physically and mentally demanding.

What she found—this is why she became so famous—was that the biggest predictor of success was not physical fitness, but it was their grit. And this was jaw-dropping. For something that is physically demanding, she found that physical fitness was less valuable than grit. So if that's true, this grit must be a magic potion.

But the problem here is the difference between evidence and proof. What she looked at was a very narrow setting of very fit people. These are people who'd already got into West Point, and they already had the threshold level of fitness to survive. That’s why fitness didn’t matter—because they were already fit enough.

If you extend this to the general population, well, actually, for most people, you should work on your fitness, because that's the best thing to work on—rather than your grit.

Why does this really matter for teaching our kids? If we give them the idea that you can succeed in almost anything as long as you just work hard enough and have passion enough, that is an inspiring message—but it might just be unrealistic. No matter how much I tried when I was a kid, I would never play for the England football team. I would never become a pop star. Maybe, boring as it might be, I should have worked more on maths, and then later on, economics.

Yes, it still matters to be passionate—and I love what I do, and hopefully that comes across in this interview. And yes, it matters to work hard. But there are limits to that. It doesn't mean that the world is absolutely your oyster.

Yes, have passion. Yes, work hard. But we are limited by some abilities that we might have. It's not just a completely free choice.

Ashish Kothari:

This nuanced view was something I didn’t have the words for, Alex, but it really came to life for me in a McKinsey setting. We were constantly looking to improve the way we recruit, how we evaluate candidates, etc. It’s an ongoing process. We’re constantly studying how teams perform well and what helps people progress to partner and be successful.

I was part of this conversation where an argument was being made based on data. We had studied from business analysts to partners and senior partners. What we found was that RQ—relationship quotient—and all these softer skills mattered more than quantitative skills.

The implication was that, when we’re interviewing, if we have a tie between two candidates and there’s only one spot, we should give it to the person with the higher RQ over quant. Or even if the RQ is a little lower, maybe we don’t focus on quant at all.

I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but in my gut I thought, this can’t be right. And your book helped me understand why. We were studying people who were already in McKinsey.

So they already meet a certain criteria—similar to your fitness example. They've already met a certain level of quantitative skill. If they didn’t get through six case interviews—where they had to do math on the fly, draw insights, apply analytical and conceptual problem solving—they would never have made it.

When you look at the group already here, they’ve all got high academics, they have high SATs, they have high quantitative scores. So again, the sample is already filtered. You can’t say, “Let’s stop considering quant skill when evaluating new candidates,” because the incoming pool is much bigger and unfiltered.

That was the fallacy we fell into. I stood by it, because my gut said it was wrong. But your book gave me the language to explain why.

And this is something we do all the time. We ask, “Which employees do well in companies?”—and that’s great. But we have to recognize there’s already selection bias. You’re not looking at the full range.

Alex Edmans:

Yes, I'm really glad that you said that issue, because this is something I wanted the reader to get from my book—not just to notice the misinformation on these particular settings, but also just have a general way of thinking that they can apply to other settings.

So this is why what I try to build is frameworks, where I illustrate these frameworks with examples that bring it to life, just like the ones that we've discussed. But I would like the reader to take more than just those specific examples—but a way of thinking more critically in general when they're encountered with data and evidence and statistics and stories.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, so let's go into that. Let's start with individuals, Alex, and then we'll go to organizations. What would you recommend are these two, three critical tests that readers should think about?

You know, there's a lot in the book. I encourage everyone to get a copy of it. But for those who are listening, here are at least three that you should start with. What would those be, Alex?

Alex Edmans:

Well, I think when you see a study—and let me actually just reduce it to two to make it even easier—is look at the credentials of the authors and, number two, look at their biases.

Now, first in terms of credentials—and I know credentials, people don't like this dirty word “credentials” because they say, “Well, is he trying to be a gatekeeper, according to who is allowed to say something or not?” And admittedly, I am.

And I think credentials are important. Just like I would like to see that somebody has a dentistry qualification before they allow me to drill my teeth, I want to know that if somebody's going to tell me how to run my company or what intervention to make, that this is based on more than just wishful thinking.

Now, it's clearly not as black and white as the idea of dentistry. So, anybody's allowed to say something. It's a free country. But how much weight I want to put on something will depend on—really—do they have expertise in that specific field?

So I might put more weight on a former CEO or a scholar who's researched hundreds of companies, than somebody like Simon Sinek, who was just a former advertising executive. So look at whether the person actually has expertise in that specific area.

If it's a paper, if it's a study, has it been published by a peer-reviewed journal? If it hasn't been peer-reviewed, then nobody's checked it. It could just be saying anything.

The second might be bias. Do you have incentives to claim your particular results?

Some of the diversity studies were written by McKinsey. And McKinsey is a great organisation in terms of being a consultancy. But their goal is not scientific research. Their goal is not to find the truth, but it's to release whatever boosts their reputation.

And had there been a result that diversity worsens performance, McKinsey would have never wanted to release that study, because people would not like it. So they wanted to cook the data and cook their interpretations to give the conclusion that diversity improves performance.

And so this is why when you look under the hood, you actually find that the evidence is really flimsy.

So those are just two simple things:

Credentials—what is the expertise in the area?

Bias—and indeed, for that, you can ask yourself: if there was the opposite result, would they be willing to release that study?

So for me, I am highlighting some of the issues with diversity studies. I've also highlighted some of the issues with purpose studies.

Now, do I have any incentive to do that? No. Because in diversity, I'm an ethnic minority. I'd love to believe it pays off. And my first book, Grow the Pie, which you interviewed me about a few years ago—that is on the power of purpose. I would love to believe that there is unambiguous evidence that purpose matters.

But the evidence is much more mixed. But the fact that I am willing to admit that there's mixed evidence should be more telling, because I don't want that to be true. I would like the evidence to be all one.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, and the other one, Alex, that I really enjoyed—your prompt—was if you, in particular, when you have a confirmation bias, if you are seeing a statement that confirms what you already believe, even without that study, ask yourself the opposite question.

What are all the factors you would come up with, what are the arguments you would come up with if somebody showed that and said it's not true? And then test for those to say, is that present?

Alex Edmans:

Absolutely. So let's look at this in terms of the breastfeeding study. Let's say you found that breastfeeding led to lower IQ rather than higher. Then people would say, well, I don't like that result. I'm going to try to knock it down.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to say, well, maybe the women who are breastfeeding are poor. They're not able to afford formulas. So maybe it's their poverty which leads to the worse IQ, not the breast milk itself.

So now that I've alerted myself to alternative explanations, ask myself: do those alternative explanations—like family background—still apply, even though the evidence is in the direction that I want?

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. So this counteractive "how can we be wrong," especially when you're so convinced something is right and you've found the evidence, is so critical.

Alex, talk to us a little bit around creating organizations that think smarter. Because when you go from individuals to teams, all of a sudden this just gets amplified.

Alex Edmans:

Yes, and so this is where diversity of thought and inclusion and psychological safety—that we’ve talked about earlier—that’s where it really matters.

To address the issue of groupthink, where everybody is saying the same thing and they don’t want to speak out because they’re seen as not being team players, create a culture that actively encourages dissent. This might be as simple as the chair not speaking first—to start with the junior people, so they don’t anchor on the chair’s views.

And if somebody says something against the grain, to actively say, “Encourage this. It’s really great that you’re challenging me.”

It might be that as a leader—and sometimes the leader is not the leader of the whole organization—if your boss is seen to challenge her boss, then the leader is role modeling the behaviors that they are espousing.

Some of these things are actually quite simple. It’s not like rocket science—just try to go out and find different viewpoints. But it’s so difficult for us because we don’t want to be proven wrong. That’s why many companies don’t do it.

Just like the idea of getting fit. Easy, right? Don’t eat chocolate cake and exercise more. But not easy—because chocolate cake is so tempting and exercise is hard work. And that is the same in terms of critical thinking.

Ashish Kothari:

Listen, Alex, this was incredibly insightful—so rich. I really encourage everyone to get a copy of the book and read it.

I have just one question to confirm, because I found this and I want to make sure it's actually yours. I found Alex Edmans’ custom GPT that can be used to look at any article you find, to see what you might be missing. Is that yours, or is that something somebody else made? I want to make sure—if that’s a resource—it is genuine and yours before we put it in the show notes.

Alex Edmans:

It’s absolutely mine. I actually made this because of a suggestion from some readers. What I develop in the book is a framework to evaluate something critically.

And sometimes people will ask me, “This is a new study that came out—can you tell me if it fits your framework?” I did that at the start, but it’s just a lot of effort. So I thought, let me develop a ChatGPT routine for this.

And let me give props to my research assistant, Andrew Tichel, who also was an RA for the book. He helped develop it. I checked it many, many times.

And so that is an available resource. You can find it on the book’s website: maycontainlies.com. Hopefully, in the show notes as well. You can just put a study into that.

Now, it works—it gets sort of 80–90% of it. It’s still not as perfect as a human, so I will still be in a job. But it’s hopefully a useful resource for people who might want a quick way of vetting something.

Ashish Kothari:

Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the power of research and science, and, frankly, the discernment that you bring into the world. I appreciate you. Thank you for joining us again.

Alex Edmans:

Thanks so much, Ashish. It’s just really great to speak to you again.