Authors Like Adam Grant

Daniel Pink, Amy Edmondson and Charles Duhigg are the three closest. Pink writes about work and motivation from the same research tradition Grant publishes in; Edmondson is the Harvard organisational-behaviour professor behind psychological safety, and is his nearest genuine academic peer; Duhigg uses the same structure of reported story plus cited study, with stronger journalism behind it. For readers who want the science Grant is drawing on rather than the application, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is the next step.

Yes. Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World is published by Viking on 13 October 2026, his first book since Hidden Potential in 2023. It is about chemistry and closeness, and the publisher's summary sets out three counterintuitive claims: that similarity is not necessary for solidarity, that chemistry does not always happen quickly, and that closeness does not always take time. If you want something in the same territory before it arrives, read Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators (2024).

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), which is the book Think Again's central premise comes from — that your confident intuitions fail in predictable, describable ways. If you want to stay in the workplace rather than the laboratory, Amy Edmondson's Right Kind of Wrong (2023) makes a compatible argument about admitting error, and Erin Meyer's The Culture Map (2014) is a useful corrective, because a lot of what Think Again treats as human turns out to be American.

Give and Take (2013). It is the one built most directly on his own peer-reviewed research, on reciprocity and prosocial motivation at work, and it establishes the pattern every later book follows. Think Again (2021) is the bigger seller and the more common entry point, so start there instead if the subject you care about is changing your mind rather than how people behave at work. None of his books require another; there is no reading order.

They share a structure and not a job. Both build chapters out of a story, a study and a named idea you can repeat afterwards — Gladwell invented that format — but Gladwell is a New Yorker journalist synthesising other people's research, while Grant is a working academic who publishes peer-reviewed studies of his own and cites them. In practice that shows up as fewer overreaching claims in Grant and better sentences in Gladwell.

An organisational psychologist. He took his PhD in organisational psychology at the University of Michigan, and he is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management at the Wharton School with a joint appointment in the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department. He is not a behavioural economist and not a social psychologist, though he draws on both; his own research is on generosity and helping, job design and meaningful work, motivation, and non-conformity.

Mostly yes, with a caveat worth knowing. He is a genuinely productive researcher and much of what he cites is solid. But the genre he writes in draws heavily on social and behavioural psychology from the 2000s and 2010s, and a significant part of that literature has not replicated — power posing failed outright, growth-mindset effects turned out to be much smaller than the popular version claimed, and grit largely collapses into conscientiousness. Grant's own signature move, sorting people into three named types, is a teaching device rather than a measured construct. Read him as an unusually well-informed argument, not as settled fact.

Amy Edmondson is the first name here: The Fearless Organization is the book on psychological safety, written by the researcher who established it. Erin Meyer's No Rules Rules, co-written with Netflix's Reed Hastings, is the same subject seen from inside one company. Both are more concrete than Grant about what a manager should actually do differently on Monday.

The genre is overwhelmingly American, which is itself worth noticing when you read its advice. The exceptions on this list are Daniel Kahneman, who was Israeli-American, Malcolm Gladwell, who is Canadian, and Erin Meyer, who is American but has spent her career in France writing specifically about how badly American workplace norms travel. Meyer's The Culture Map is the one to read if that gap is what you noticed.