In Adam Grant’s Originals, the “cast” is drawn from real entrepreneurs, activists, and leaders whose choices reveal how new ideas survive in skeptical environments. Their stories range from startup boardrooms to intelligence agencies and social movements, showing how originality is less a lone-genius moment than a series of strategic decisions, alliances, and well-placed acts of dissent. Together, they map the social terrain originals must navigate—institutions, gatekeepers, rivals, and allies.
Main Characters
The Warby Parker Founders
The story of the four cofounders is Grant’s opening proof that bold ideas thrive when paired with prudent execution. The Warby Parker Founders built their eyewear disruptor methodically—keeping day jobs and internships, testing names and models, and de-risking their concept with the home try-on program—while their partnership (Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andy Hunt, and Jeff Raider) emphasized fairness and collaboration, even sharing the CEO role. Their dynamic with Adam Grant himself—who passed on an early investment—underscores the book’s challenge to the myth of the fearless entrepreneur. As a case study, they anchor the argument that careful planning and portfolio balancing, not reckless leaps, drive many breakthrough ventures, crystallizing Risk Mitigation and the Myth of the Risk-Taker.
Carmen Medina
A reformer inside a rigid institution, Carmen Medina shows how originals gain traction by voicing dissent strategically rather than loudly. After her early push for an intelligence-sharing platform damaged her standing, she rebuilt credibility in conventional roles, learned to frame her proposal within the CIA’s core mission, and accumulated “idiosyncrasy credits” before rallying support for what became Intellipedia. Her uneasy but crucial alliance with a tough, disagreeable boss (“Mike”) illustrates that the best champions of change may be those who challenge you hardest, while the broader CIA hierarchy personifies the inertia originals must outmaneuver. Medina’s arc is a playbook for timing, framing, and coalition-building in hostile environments, encapsulated in Voicing Dissent Effectively.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Grant portrays Martin Luther King, Jr. as a reluctant original whose hesitations became strengths, keeping him open to influence and improvisation. Initially coaxed into leadership during the Montgomery bus boycott, King refined his message through collaboration with fellow activists and, famously, through on-the-spot adaptation—pivoting mid-speech at the March on Washington when Mahalia Jackson urged him to “tell them about the dream.” His habit of delaying the final form of his remarks created room for inspiration and collective input, demonstrating that procrastination can fuel creativity rather than sabotage it. The result is a portrait of leadership as emergent and participatory, not preordained.
Lucy Stone
A pivotal architect of suffrage strategy, Lucy Stone embodies the tempered radical who advances change by building broad, pragmatic coalitions. While her early alignment with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fractured over tactics and ideology, Stone reframed suffrage to resonate with mainstream audiences—allying with Frances Willard and the WCTU and promoting the “home protection ballot” to appeal to conservatives. Her clashes with former allies illustrate the “narcissism of small differences,” where in-fighting among near neighbors stalls progress, even as her bridge-building approach expands the movement’s base. Stone’s career demonstrates that moderation in message can be radical in effect when it wins durable support.
Supporting Characters
Steve Jobs
A recurring exemplar of visionary drive and its blind spots, Steve Jobs showcases how intuition can both spark breakthroughs and misfire outside one’s domain. His willingness to be challenged—elevating Donna Dubinsky after she dismantled his distribution plan—sits alongside his overconfidence in the Segway, illustrating the importance of credible dissent and domain expertise. His admiration for Edwin Land maps a lineage of inspiration, ambition, and the cultural perils of strong founding visions.
Donna Dubinsky
At Apple, Donna Dubinsky models effective upward dissent: she leveraged past results to earn the right to challenge Jobs, demanded time to craft a data-backed alternative, and framed her pushback as loyalty to the company’s mission. Winning the argument and a promotion, she later chose “exit” over “voice,” leaving to cofound Handspring when Apple’s openness to change narrowed—underscoring that originality sometimes requires changing arenas, not just minds.
Edwin Land
A brilliant inventor and Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land built Polaroid on a singular vision that eventually hardened into groupthink. By surrounding himself with loyalists and dismissing digital photography, he fostered a culture unable to pivot, leading to flops like Polavision and a missed digital future. Land’s legacy warns that creativity without institutionalized dissent can calcify into costly dogma.
Ray Dalio
As Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio offers a countermodel to founder-centric monocultures: a systematized idea meritocracy built on radical transparency. By codifying principles, demanding forthright criticism across levels, and rewarding the surfacing of dissent, he shows how strong commitment cultures can also remain intellectually flexible—key to Fostering a Culture of Originality.
Srdja Popovic
A strategist of nonviolent revolution, Srdja Popovic uses humor and “dilemma actions” to convert fear into engagement and apathy into urgency. Through Otpor!’s symbols, low-risk participation, and escalating tactics, he demonstrates how emotion management builds momentum and safety in numbers—methods he later exported to movements worldwide.
Minor Characters
- Dean Kamen: Inventor of the Segway whose proximity to his creation clouded market judgment, illustrating the danger of technology push without audience pull.
- Rick Ludwin: The NBC executive who protected Seinfeld early on, exemplifying the “insider–outsider” evaluator with genre expertise and cross-domain perspective.
- Rufus Griscom: Babble’s founder who led with reasons not to invest, showcasing the Sarick Effect—disarming skepticism through candid, self-critical framing.
- Frances Willard: WCTU leader who reframed suffrage as “home protection,” a Trojan horse strategy that broadened appeal among conservative constituencies.
- Lewis Pugh: Endurance swimmer who toggled between defensive pessimism and energizing excitement to master fear ahead of extreme feats.
- Jackie Robinson: Barrier-breaking Dodger whose risk tolerance (like stealing home) illustrates how family dynamics and birth order can shape originality.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The core dynamics in Originals show how ideas advance through tension between challengers and champions, and between radical purity and tempered pragmatism. The Warby Parker Founders transform friendship into a deliberately balanced partnership—sharing power and pacing risk—while their relationship with Adam Grant underscores how even expert evaluators misread early-stage originality. In contrast, Carmen Medina’s ascent depends on earning credibility within a high-status hierarchy, then leveraging a disagreeable but principled boss to shield and scale her dissent.
Among movement leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s improvisational genius emerges from collective pressure and collaboration—he is nudged into leadership by peers and catalyzed mid-speech by Mahalia Jackson—spotlighting originality as a social process. Lucy Stone’s arc runs on a parallel track: her coalition-building with Frances Willard expands suffrage’s tent even as rifts with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton expose “horizontal hostility,” where allied factions undermine one another over strategy and tone.
Across organizations, Steve Jobs, Donna Dubinsky, and Edwin Land illustrate a spectrum of dissent and culture. Jobs can be persuaded by rigorous counterargument; Dubinsky’s success shows how credibility and mission-first framing convert conflict into organizational learning; Land’s downfall warns that insulating a founder’s vision breeds brittle consensus. Ray Dalio offers the systemic antidote—hardwiring dissent into daily practice—while Srdja Popovic reveals the movement-level equivalent: design tactics that make participation safe, visible, and emotionally contagious. Together, these relationships chart the ecosystems where originality either compounds through constructive friction or collapses under purity tests and unchallenged certainty.