Give and Take | Adam Grant

In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary. This book was a summer read for me and I highlighted a lot quotes in Adam’s Grant’s “Give and Take”.

Good Returns

According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck.

The Peacock and the Panda

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

- Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner

According to Brian Uzzi, a management professor at Northwestern University, networks come with three major advantages: private information, diverse skills, and power. By developing a strong network, people can gain invaluable access to knowledge, expertise, and influence. Extensive research demonstrates that people with rich networks achieve higher performance ratings, get promoted faster, and earn more money. And because networks are based on interactions and relationships, they serve as a powerful prism for understanding the impact of reciprocity styles on success.

At some point in your life, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of dealing with slick schmoozers who are nice to your face when they want a favor, but end up stabbing you in the back—or simply ignoring you—after they get what they want. This faker style of networking casts the entire enterprise as Machiavellian, a self-serving activity in which people make connections for the sole purpose of advancing their own interests.

Although takers tend to be dominant and controlling with subordinates, they’re surprisingly submissive and deferential toward superiors.

As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

Networking guru Keith Ferrazzi summarizes in Never Eat Alone, “It’s better to give before you receive."

At its core, the giver approach extends a broader reach, and in doing so enlarges the range of potential payoffs, even though those payoffs are not the motivating engine. “When you meet people,” says former Apple evangelist and Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki, regardless of who they are, “you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I help the other person?’” This may strike some as a way to overinvest in others, but as Adam Rifkin once learned to great effect, we can’t always predict who can help.

Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.

Here’s the wrinkle: it’s tough to ask weak ties for help. Although they’re the faster route to new leads, we don’t always feel comfortable reaching out to them. The lack of mutual trust between acquaintances creates a psychological barrier. But givers like Adam Rifkin have discovered a loophole. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds: the trust of strong ties coupled with the novel information of weak ties.

The key is reconnecting, and it’s a major reason why givers succeed in the long run.

According to networking experts, reconnecting is a totally different experience for givers, especially in a wired world. Givers have a track record of generously sharing their knowledge, teaching us their skills, and helping us find jobs without worrying about what’s in it for them, so we’re glad to help them when they get back in touch with us.

In traditional old-school reciprocity, people operated like matchers, trading value back and forth with one another. We helped the people who helped us, and we gave to the people from whom we wanted something in return. But today, givers like Adam Rifkin are able to spark a more powerful form of reciprocity. Instead of trading value, Rifkin aims to add value. His giving is governed by a simple rule: the five-minute favor. “You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody."

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.” When people feel grateful for Rifkin’s help, like Stephanie, they’re more likely to pay it forward. “I have always been a very genuine and kind-hearted person,” Stephanie says, “but I had tried to hide it and be more competitive so that I could get ahead. The important lesson I learned from Adam is that you can be a genuinely kind-hearted person and still get ahead in the world.”

The Ripple Effect

John Kanengieter, who directs leadership at NOLS, adds that expedition behavior is “not a zero-sum game: when you give it away, you gain more in response.”

Research shows that givers get extra credit when they offer ideas that challenge the status quo.

“A lot of people feel they’re diminished if there are too many names on a script, like everybody’s trying to share a dog bowl,” Meyer says. “But that’s not really the way it works. The thing about credit is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s room for everybody, and you’ll shine if other people are shining.”

“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.” 

It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your colleagues contribute.

Finding the Diamond in the Rough

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.

—attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist

Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.

The psychologist Angela Duckworth calls this grit: having passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. Her research shows that above and beyond intelligence and aptitude, gritty people—by virtue of their interest, focus, and drive—achieve higher performance. “Persistence is incredibly important,” says psychologist Tom Kolditz, a brigadier general who headed up behavioral sciences and leadership at the U.S. Military Academy for a dozen years. The standard selection rate for Army officers to key command positions is 12 percent; Kolditz’s former faculty have been selected at rates as high as 75 percent, and he chalks much of it up to selecting candidates based on grit. As George Anders writes in The Rare Find, “you can’t take motivation for granted."

One of the keys to cultivating grit is making the task at hand more interesting and motivating.

Studies show that people actually make more accurate and creative decisions when they’re choosing on behalf of others than themselves. When people make decisions in a self-focused state, they’re more likely to be biased by ego threat and often agonize over trying to find a choice that’s ideal in all possible dimensions. When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others.

“If you choose to champion great talent, you will be picking one of the most altruistic things a person can do,” writes George Anders. “In any given year, quick-hit operators may make more money and win more recognition, at least briefly. Over time, though, that dynamic reverses."

The Power of Powerless Communication

Speak softly, but carry a big stick.

—Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president

New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In one experiment, researcher Katie Liljenquist had people negotiate the possible sale of commercial property. When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only 8 percent reached a successful agreement. When the sellers asked the buyers for advice on how to meet their goals, 42 percent reached a successful agreement. Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.

Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively. When we ask others for advice, we’re posing a question that conveys uncertainty and makes us vulnerable. Instead of confidently projecting that we have all the answers, we’re admitting that others might have superior knowledge. As a result, takers and matchers tend to shy away from advice seeking. From a taker’s perspective, asking for advice means acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Takers may fear that seeking advice might make them look weak, dependent, or incompetent. They’re wrong: research shows that people who regularly seek advice and help from knowledgeable colleagues are actually rated more favorably by supervisors than those who never seek advice and help.

Appearing vulnerable doesn’t bother givers, who worry far less about protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it’s because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others. Matchers hold back on advice seeking for a different reason: they might owe something in return.

The Art of Motivation Maintenance

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

—Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics

Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls. If people give too much time, they end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense of their own energy. If people give away too much credit and engage in too much powerless communication, it’s all too easy for them to become pushovers and doormats, failing to advance their own interests. The consequence: givers end up exhausted and unproductive.

Since the strategies that catapult givers to the top are distinct from those that sink givers to the bottom, it’s critical to understand what differentiates successful givers from failed givers.

Doing A Good Job Here

Is Like Wetting Your Pants in a Dark Suit

You Get A Warm Feeling But No One Else Notices

If you spend the money on yourself, your happiness doesn’t change. But if you spend the money on others, you actually report becoming significantly happier. This is otherish giving: you get to choose who you help, and it benefits you by improving your mood. Economists call it the warm glow of giving, and psychologists call it the helper’s high. Recent neuroscience evidence shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centers in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others.

Chump Change

No good deed goes unpunished.

—attributed to Clare Boothe Luce, editor, playwright, and U.S. congresswoman

Empathy is a pervasive force behind giving behaviors, but it’s also a major source of vulnerability.

Game theorists call this tit for tat, and it’s a pure matcher strategy: start out cooperating, and stay cooperative unless your counterpart competes.

Givers tend to be humble and uncomfortable asserting themselves directly. Studies in more controlled settings have shown that in zero-sum situations, givers frequently shy away from advocating for their own interests: when negotiating their salaries, they make more modest requests than matchers and takers, and end up accepting less favorable outcomes.

The Scrooge Shift

One person’s trash really is another’s treasure.

Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who “were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Out of the Shadows

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return . . . after helping others . . . They just go on to something else . . . We should be like that.

—Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor

Although many of us hold strong giver values, we’re often reluctant to express them at work. But the growth of teamwork, service jobs, and social media has opened up new opportunities for givers to develop relationships and reputations that accelerate and amplify their success. We’ve covered evidence that givers can rise to the top across a stunningly diverse range of occupations, from engineering to medicine to sales. And remember when Peter Audet, the Australian financial adviser, seemed to be wasting hours of his time by driving out to help a poor scrap metal worker manage his money? The client turned out to be the wealthy owner of a scrap metal business, resulting in major gains for Peter’s firm—but the story doesn’t end there.

Peter learned that the scrap metal owner was too busy running the business to take a vacation, and he wanted to help. A few months later, another client expressed that she wasn’t happy in her job as a manager at an auto body shop. Peter recommended her to the scrap metal owner, who had a need for her skills, and it turned out that she lived five minutes away from the scrap metal yard. She started work three weeks later, and the client took his wife on their first vacation in years. “Both of these clients are happy and grateful that I think about their whole lives, not just their investments,” Peter says. “The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.”

In the mind of a giver, the definition of success itself takes on a distinctive meaning. Whereas takers view success as attaining results that are superior to others’ and matchers see success in terms of balancing individual accomplishments with fairness to others, givers are inclined to follow Peter’s lead, characterizing success as individual achievements that have a positive impact on others. Taking this definition of success seriously might require dramatic changes in the way that organizations hire, evaluate, reward, and promote people. It would mean paying attention not only to the productivity of individual people but also to the ripple effects of this productivity on others. If we broadened our image of success to include contributions to others along with individual accomplishments, people might be motivated to tilt their professional reciprocity styles toward giving. If success required benefiting others, it’s possible that takers and matchers would be more inclined to find otherish ways to advance personal and collective interests simultaneously.

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

We spend the majority of our waking hours at work. This means that what we do at work becomes a fundamental part of who we are. If we reserve giver values for our personal lives, what will be missing in our professional lives? By shifting ever so slightly in the giver direction, we might find our waking hours marked by greater success, richer meaning, and more lasting.

Actions For Impact

“The more you give, the more you want to do it—as do others around you. It’s like going to the gym,” Nipun says. “If you’ve been working out your kindness muscles, you get stronger at it.”

Wayne and Cheryl Baker note that people can “Start the spark of reciprocity by making requests as well as helping others. Help generously and without thought of return; but also ask often for what you need.”