Think outside of the box with Mr Adam Grant’s advice.

Mr Adam Grant invented Facebook. Well, almost. “When I got into Harvard, I was worried that I wasn’t going to know anybody,” explains the Wharton professor and bestselling business author. This was the late 1990s, when the US was still using AOL. “So I started running some profile searches, to see if anybody else was planning on going. And about 15 of us met each other online, and started emailing back and forth.” This escalated, and eventually Mr Grant started university with a mailing list of more than 200 fellow students. Later, a newspaper asked if he planned to replicate the idea for other schools. “And I said ‘no, no, I’m going to be a college student’” – Mr Grant laughs – “A few years later, Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook in the dorm next door.”

So, a missed opportunity, perhaps. Actually, it didn’t matter: today, Mr Grant is the author of two bestselling books; his class is the most popular at Wharton, and he has worked with companies like Facebook and Google, and the US military on how to create and sustain innovative corporate cultures. Next week, he’s appearing as one of the keynote speakers (alongside Mr Nile Rodgers, Ms Jill Soloway and Mr Zane Lowe) at the 2017 SXSW festival. But still, his decision proved pivotal. “It never would have occurred to me, or any of the group, to become entrepreneurs,” he says. “It made me wonder: why did we write ourselves off so early? That’s when I realised originals are just like us. They just made different choices.”

That’s the central thesis of Mr Grant’s Originals: How Non-Conformists Change The World (WH Allen) – which was newly released in paperback recently. In it, Mr Grant unpicks some of the myths about successful entrepreneurs. For example: that they’re bold risk-takers. “I’ve met Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk,” he says. “The first thing these people say is they don’t want to do something unless they know it’s going to be successful.”

Instead, Mr Grant argues, the secret to true originality – in yourself and others – is to create an environment of relentless creation and acceptable failure. He cites Mr Thomas Edison, who filed for more than 1,000 patents, only a handful of which were truly revolutionary. “Practice makes perfect,” he says, “but it doesn’t make new.”

Taking us beyond the cliché of the genius inventor, much of Mr Grant’s teachings focus on how originality can be promoted within the workplace. One exercise he encourages wholeheartedly is to destroy your own company. “Bring the key people together twice a year to figure out how to put your company out of business,” he says. “It makes it safer for people to speak up [and] people think better on offense than on defence.”

He also challenges the traditional approach to idea generation: to discourage groupthink, he advises replacing “brainstorms” with “brain rights”, in which ideas are generated individually then discussed as a group. He suggests companies have an “opposites day”, to let employees from organisational or engineering departments contribute to creative projects  And he’s also keen on improving hiring practices – in his opinion, more diverse workplaces create better ideas. “It’s too common for companies, as they grow, to start cloning who is already working in their culture,” he says. Instead, he champions “hiring and promoting on cultural contribution, rather than cultural fit.”

Such exercises, Mr Grant says, may not make you, or find you, the next Mr Steve Jobs. But, he argues, rather than focusing relentlessly on results, workplaces should look at creating better, more vibrant processes. “You need to have lots of those to have great outcomes. It’s like being a venture capitalist: you have a portfolio of 20-30 investments, and you only expect one or two of those to really work.”

Mr Grant’s next step is to take on another even more profound workplace problem. This April will see the release of Option B, which Mr Grant has co-written with Facebook COO Ms Sheryl Sandberg, about the loss of Ms Sandberg’s late husband. “It’s a book about facing adversity and building resilience,” he says. “How do we find strength, individually and collectively, to overcome or persevere in the face of those kind of events?”

“My hope is we’re going to be able to get some conversations going, and some practices changed, about dealing with the adversity we all face – both professionally and personally.”