Harvard's Francesca Gino can help you become a better rebel

As a teenager in her in Italy, Francesca Gino briefly tried a summer job picking potatoes. Her boss wanted each laborer to work the fields alone, in silence. But this spirited newcomer had a different idea.

"I made this suggestion: 'Why don't we do it in pairs, so you get to talk to another person?'" Sure enough, what started as a brief experiment became a new and more productive way of working. In the years since that potato-patch encounter, the one-time field hand has built a fast-track career in the United States, where she's now a tenured professor at Harvard Business School.

Despite her rise in academia, Gino remains fully committed to the rebel's cause. Yes, she observes, "rebels are often thought of as the annoying people in organizations, who slow us down and get in our way." But to her, that's unfair. Some rebels are "really effective because because they break rules that should in fact be questioned."

In early December, I visited the HBS campus in Boston to get some of Prof. Gino's insights first-hand. The embedded video below provides a quick tour of her research interests, her background, and her maverick approach to life.

If you're looking for a fuller sampling of her work, start with her 2018 book: "Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life." This Weekend Essay, published on LinkedIn shortly after the book launch, is a handy introduction, too.

And if you're ready for an MBA-grade brain boost, there's nothing like sampling some of the actual research papers that she's co-authored. Thanks to her provocative theses -- and insouciant titles -- browsing her research findings can be surprisingly entertaining.

Start with "How dishonesty can lead to greater creativity." Make your way over to "The burden of guilt: Heavy backpacks, light snacks and enhanced morality." Give your own snarky tendencies a boost with her salute to sarcasm.

Like most effective rebels, Prof. Gino makes sure there's a legitimate strategy hidden beneath all this excitement. As she explained in our interview: "I often think about two dimensions in terms of research projects that are worth investigating. One: are they novel in terms of contributing to the existing literature. But second, is this research saying something that fundamentally can change the way we interact with one another?"

Those are big goals. But for her -- and the rest of us -- the rewards for aiming high are too valuable to forgo.

A version of this interview is published in the February issue of Delta Sky magazine. #5MinutesWith #leadership #disrupting