by Adam Grant
In 2011, when Peter was working as a financial adviser, he received a call from an Australian client. The client wanted to make changes to a small superannuation fund valued at $70,000. A staff member was assigned to the client, but looked him up and saw that he was a scrap metal worker. Thinking like a matcher, the staff member declined to make the visit: it was a waste of his time. It certainly wasn’t worth Peter’s time. He specialized in high net worth clients, whose funds were worth a thousand times more money, and his largest client had more than $100 million. If you calculated the dollar value of Peter’s time, the scrap metal worker’s fund was not even worth the amount of time it would take to drive out to his house. “He was the tiniest client, and no one wanted to see him; it was beneath everybody,” Peter reflects. “But you can’t just ignore someone because you don’t think they’re important enough.”
Peter scheduled an appointment to drive out to see the scrap metal worker and help him with the plan changes. When he pulled up to the house, his jaw dropped. The front door was covered in cobwebs and had not been opened in months. He drove around to the back, where a thirty-four-year-old man opened the door. The living room was full of bugs, and he could see straight through to the roof: the entire ceiling had been ripped out. The client made a feeble gesture to some folding chairs, and Peter began working through the client’s plan changes. Feeling sympathy for the client, who seemed like an earnest, hardworking blue-collar man, Peter made a generous offer. “While I’m here, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can help you with.”
The client mentioned a love of cars, and walked him around back to a dingy shed. Peter braced himself for another depressing display of poverty, envisioning a pile of rusted metal. When Peter stepped inside the shed, he gasped. Spread out before him in immaculate condition were a first-generation Chevy Camaro, built in 1966; two vintage Australian Valiant cars with 1,000-horsepower engines for drag racing; a souped-up coupe utility car; and a Ford coupe from the movie Mad Max. The client was not a scrap metal worker; he owned a lucrative scrap metal business. He had just bought the house to fix it up; it was on eleven acres, and it cost $1.4 million. Peter spent the next year reengineering the client’s business, improving his tax position, and helping him renovate the house. “All I did was start out by doing a kindness,” Peter notes. “When I got to work the next day, I had to laugh at my colleague who wasn’t prepared to give a bit by driving out to visit the client.” Peter went on to develop a strong relationship with the client, whose fees multiplied by a factor of a hundred the following year, and expects to continue working with him for decades.
Over the course of his career, giving has enabled Peter Audet to access opportunities that takers and matchers routinely miss, but it has also cost him dearly. As you’ll see in chapter 7, he was exploited by two takers who nearly put him out of business. Yet Peter managed to climb from the bottom to the top of the success ladder, becoming one of the more productive financial advisers in Australia. The key, he believes, was learning to harness the benefits of giving while minimizing the costs. As a managing director at Genesys Wealth Advisers, he managed to rescue his firm from the brink of bankruptcy and turn it into an industry leader, and he chalks his success up to being a giver. “There’s no doubt that I’ve succeeded in business because I give to other people. It’s my weapon of choice,” Peter says. “When I’m head-to-head with another adviser to try and win business, people tell me this is why I win.”
Although technological and organizational changes have made giving more advantageous, there’s one feature of giving that’s more timeless: when we reflect on our guiding principles in life, many of us are intuitively drawn to giving. Over the past three decades, the esteemed psychologist Shalom Schwartz has studied the values and guiding principles that matter to people in different cultures around the world. One of his studies surveyed reasonably representative samples of thousands of adults in Australia, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. He translated his survey into a dozen languages, and asked respondents to rate the importance of different values. Here are a few examples:
List 1
Wealth (money, material possessions)
Power (dominance, control over others)
Pleasure (enjoying life)
Winning (doing better than others)
List 2
Helpfulness (working for the well-being of others)
Responsibility (being dependable)
Social justice (caring for the disadvantaged)
Compassion (responding to the needs of others)
Takers favor the values in List 1, whereas givers prioritize the values in List 2. Schwartz wanted to know where most people would endorse giver values. Take a look back at the twelve countries above. Where do the majority of people endorse giver values above taker values?
All of them. In all twelve countries, most people rate giving as their single most important value. They report caring more about giving than about power, achievement, excitement, freedom, tradition, conformity, security, and pleasure. In fact, this was true in more than seventy different countries around the world. Giver values are the number-one guiding principle in life to most people in most countries—from Argentina to Armenia, Belgium to Brazil, and Slovakia to Singapore. In the majority of the world’s cultures, including that of the United States, the majority of people endorse giving as their single most important guiding principle.
On some level, this comes as no surprise. As parents, we read our children books like The Giving Tree and emphasize the importance of sharing and caring. But we tend to compartmentalize giving, reserving a different set of values for the sphere of work. We may love Shel Silverstein for our kids, but the popularity of books like Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power—not to mention the fascination of many business gurus with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—suggests that we don’t see much room for giver values in our professional lives.
As a result, even people who operate like givers at work are often afraid to admit it. In the summer of 2011, I met a woman named Sherryann Plesse, an executive at a prestigious financial services firm. Sherryann was clearly a giver: she spent countless hours mentoring junior colleagues and volunteered to head up a women’s leadership initiative and a major charitable fund-raising initiative at her firm. “My default is to give,” she says. “I’m not looking for quid pro quo; I’m looking to make a difference and have an impact, and I focus on the people who can benefit from my help the most.”
To enrich her business acumen, Sherryann left her job for six weeks, enrolling in a leadership program with sixty executives from companies around the world. To identify her strengths, she underwent a comprehensive psychological assessment. Sherryann was shocked to learn that her top professional strengths were kindness and compassion. Fearing that the results would jeopardize her reputation as a tough and successful leader, Sherryann decided not to tell anyone. “I didn’t want to sound like a flake. I was afraid people would perceive me differently, perhaps as a less serious executive,” Sherryann confided. “I was conditioned to leave my human feelings at the door, and win. I want my primary skills to be seen as hardworking and results-oriented, not kindness and compassion. In business, sometimes you have to wear different masks.”
The fear of being judged as weak or naïve prevents many people from operating like givers at work. Many people who hold giver values in life choose matching as their primary reciprocity style at work, seeking an even balance of give and take. In one study, people completed a survey about whether their default approach to work relationships was to give, take, or match. Only 8 percent described themselves as givers; the other 92 percent were not willing to contribute more than they received at work. In another study, I found that in the office, more than three times as many people prefer to be matchers than givers.
/> People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum. Whether it’s a company with forced ranking systems, a group of firms vying to win the same clients, or a school with required grading curves and more demand than supply for desirable jobs, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean more toward taking than giving. “When they anticipate self-interested behavior from others,” explains the Stanford psychologist Dale Miller, people fear that they’ll be exploited if they operate like givers, so they conclude that “pursuing a competitive orientation is the rational and appropriate thing to do.” There’s even evidence that just putting on a business suit and analyzing a Harvard Business School case is enough to significantly reduce the attention that people pay to relationships and the interests of others. The fear of exploitation by takers is so pervasive, writes the Cornell economist Robert Frank, that “by encouraging us to expect the worst in others it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.”
Giving is especially risky when dealing with takers, and David Hornik believes that many of the world’s most successful venture capitalists operate like takers—they insist on disproportionately large shares of entrepreneurs’ start-ups and claim undue credit when their investments prove successful. Hornik is determined to change these norms. When a financial planner asked him what he wanted to achieve in life, Hornik said that “above all, I want to demonstrate that success doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense.”
In an attempt to prove it, Hornik has broken two of the most sacred rules in the venture business. In 2004, he became the first venture capitalist to start a blog. Venture capital was a black box, so Hornik invited entrepreneurs inside. He began to share information openly online, helping entrepreneurs to improve their pitches by gaining a deeper understanding of how venture capitalists think. Hornik’s partners, and his firm’s general counsel, discouraged him from doing it. Why would he want to give away trade secrets? If other investors read his blog, they could steal ideas without sharing any in return. “The idea of a venture capitalist talking about what he was doing was considered insane,” Hornik reflects. “But I really wanted to engage in a conversation with a broad set of entrepreneurs, and be helpful to them.” His critics were right: “Lots of venture capitalists ended up reading it. When I talked about specific companies I was excited about, getting deals became more competitive.” But that was a price that Hornik was willing to pay. “My focus was entirely on creating value for entrepreneurs,” he says, and he has maintained the blog for the past eight years.
Hornik’s second unconventional move was ignited by his frustration with dull speakers at conferences. Back in college, he had teamed up with a professor to run a speakers’ bureau so he could invite interesting people to campus. The lineup included the inventor of the game Dungeons & Dragons, the world yo-yo champion, and the animator who created the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon characters for Warner Bros. By comparison, speakers at venture capital and technology conferences weren’t measuring up. “I discovered that I stopped going in to hear the speakers, and I would spend all my time chatting with people in the lobby about what they’re working on. The real value of these events was the conversations and relationships that were created between people. What if a conference was about conversations and relationships, not content?”
In 2007, Hornik planned his first annual conference. It was called The Lobby, and the goal was to bring entrepreneurs together to share ideas about new media. Hornik was putting about $400,000 on the line, and people tried to talk him out of it. “You could destroy your firm’s reputation,” they warned, hinting that if the conference failed, Hornik’s own career might be ruined. But he pressed forward, and when it was time to send out invitations, Hornik did the unthinkable. He invited venture capitalists at rival firms to attend the conference.
Several colleagues thought he was out of his mind. “Why in the world would you let other venture capitalists come to the conference?” they asked. If Hornik met an entrepreneur with a hot new idea at The Lobby, he would have a leg up on landing the investment. Why would he want to give away his advantage and help his competitors find opportunities? Once again, Hornik ignored the naysayers. “I want to create an experience to benefit everyone, not just me.” One of the rival venture capitalists who attended liked the format so much that he created his own Lobby-style conference, but he didn’t invite Hornik—or any other venture capitalists. His partners wouldn’t let him. Nevertheless, Hornik kept inviting venture capitalists to The Lobby.
David Hornik recognizes the costs of operating like a giver. “Some people think I’m delusional. They believe the way you achieve is by being a taker,” he says. If he were more of a taker, he probably wouldn’t accept unsolicited pitches, respond personally to e-mails, share information with competitors on his blog, or invite his rivals to benefit from The Lobby conference. He would protect his time, guard his knowledge, and leverage his connections more carefully. And if he were more of a matcher, he would have asked for quid pro quo with the venture capitalist who attended The Lobby but didn’t invite Hornik to his own conference. But Hornik pays more attention to what other people need than to what he gets from them. Hornik has been extremely successful as a venture capitalist while living by his values, and he’s widely respected for his generosity. “It’s a win-win,” Hornik reflects. “I get to create an environment where other people can get deals and build relationships, and I live in the world I want to live in.” His experience reinforces that giving not only is professionally risky; it can also be professionally rewarding.
* * *
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Understanding what makes giving both powerful and dangerous is the focus of Give and Take. The first section unveils the principles of giver success, illuminating how and why givers rise to the top. I’ll show you how successful givers have unique approaches to interactions in four key domains: networking, collaborating, evaluating, and influencing. A close look at networking highlights fresh approaches for developing connections with new contacts and strengthening ties with old contacts. Examining collaboration reveals what it takes to work productively with colleagues and earn their respect. Exploring how we evaluate others offers counterintuitive techniques for judging and developing talent to get the best results out of others. And an analysis of influence sheds light on novel strategies for presenting, selling, persuading, and negotiating, all in the spirit of convincing others to support our ideas and interests. Across these four domains, you’ll see what successful givers do differently—and what takers and matchers can learn from their approach. Along the way, you’ll find out how America’s best networker developed his connections, why the genius behind one of the most successful shows in television history toiled for years in anonymity, how a basketball executive responsible for some of the worst draft busts in history turned things around, whether a lawyer who stumbles on his words can beat a lawyer who speaks with confidence, and how you can spot a taker just from looking at a Facebook profile.
In the second part of the book, the focus shifts from the benefits of giving to the costs, and how they can be managed. I’ll examine how givers protect themselves against burnout and avoid becoming pushovers and doormats. You’ll discover how a teacher reduced her burnout by giving more rather than less, how a billionaire made money by giving it away, and the ideal number of hours to volunteer if you want to become happier and live longer. You’ll see why giving slowed one consultant’s path to partner but accelerated another’s, why we misjudge who’s a giver and who’s a taker, and how givers protect themselves at the bargaining table. You’ll also gain knowledge about how givers avoid the bottom of the success ladder and rise to the top by nudging other people away from taking and toward giving. You’ll learn about a ninety-minute activity that unleashes giving in remarkable ways, and you’ll figure out why people give things away fo
r free that they could easily sell for a profit on Craigslist, why some radiologists get better but others get worse, why thinking about Superman makes people less likely to volunteer, and why people named Dennis are unusually likely to become dentists.
By the time you finish reading this book, you may be reconsidering some of your fundamental assumptions about success. If you’re a self-sacrificing giver, you’ll find plenty of insights for ascending from the bottom to the top of the success ladder. If you endorse giver values but act like a matcher at work, you may be pleasantly surprised by the wealth of opportunities to express your values and find meaning in helping others without compromising your own success. Instead of aiming to succeed first and give back later, you might decide that giving first is a promising path to succeeding later. And if you currently lean toward taking, you may just be tempted to shift in the giver direction, seeking to master the skills of this growing breed of people who achieve success by contributing to others.
But if you do it only to succeed, it probably won’t work.
2
The Peacock and the Panda
How Givers, Takers, and Matchers Build Networks
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
Several decades ago, a man who started his life in poverty lived the American Dream. He came from humble beginnings, growing up in Missouri farm towns without indoor plumbing. To help support his family, the young man worked long hours on farms and paper routes. He put himself through college at the University of Missouri, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and completed a master’s degree and then a doctorate in economics. He pursued a life of public service, enlisting in the Navy and then serving in several important roles in the U.S. government, earning the Navy Commendation Medal and National Defense Service Medal. From there, he built his own company, where he was chairman and CEO for fifteen years. By the time he stepped down, his company was worth $110 billion, with more than twenty thousand employees in forty countries around the world. For five consecutive years, Fortune named his company “America’s Most Innovative Company” and one of the twenty-five best places to work in the country. When asked about his success, he acknowledged the importance of “Respect . . . the golden rule . . . Absolute integrity . . . Everyone knows that I personally have a very strict code of personal conduct that I live by.” He set up a charitable family foundation, giving over $2.5 million to more than 250 organizations, and donated 1 percent of his company’s annual profits to charity. His giving attracted the attention of former president George W. Bush, who commended him as a “good guy” and a “generous person.”
