by Adam Grant
Stockton, John, 109
Stossel, John, 128–29
Stress. See also Burn-out
fight or flight, 177
Student Advisory Centre, 184–85
Stuttering, 128–29
Success
of givers, 6–10, 15–17, 156–58
giver view of, 257
matcher view of, 256–57
taker view of, 256
traits related to, 4
wealth-giving connection, 181–82
Summit of Industrialized Nations, 29
Sunk cost fallacy, 113
Sun Tzu, 21–22
Superhero traits, 234–35
Sze, David, 41n
T
Tafel, Edgar, 68
Tag questions, in powerless speech, 144
Takers
advice seeking from, 153
becoming givers, 219–20, 245–49
board of director positions, 150
call center productivity, 162–63
CEO takers, recognizing, 34–38
and collaboration, 69–70
and creativity, 65, 67–69
disguised as givers, 31–39
and empathy trap, 195–201
and escalation of commitment, 113–17
expectations of others, low, 101
favors, expected return from, 44–45, 58
first impressions of, 32
geniuses as, 63
independence versus interdependence, 69–73, 81
influence, traits related to, 130
“kissing up, kicking down,” 32–33
losses/decline of, 28, 33–34, 45, 67–69, 80–81
negotiation by, 149
and networking, 29–30, 39–41, 43–46, 56
perspective gap, 88, 91–92
in power, behavior of, 33
powerful communication, 130, 133, 147
punished by matchers, 33–34
in Reciprocity Ring, 244–45
responsibility bias of, 82, 84
sincerity screening to identify, 189–94
social networks revelations about, 39–41, 43
success, view of, 256
tendencies related to, 4, 25
Talent development, 94–125
basketball players and coach, 108–11, 115–22, 124–25
concert pianist study, 104–5
disappointing candidates, investing in, 108–12
encouragement, effects of, 102–8
escalation of commitment concept, 112–17
and givers, 101–2, 106–7, 114–17
grit and success, 105–6
investment theory of intelligence, 104
and matchers, 101
practice and success, 104
self-fulfilling prophecy, 99–102
and takers, 101, 113–14
teachers and students, 96–97, 99–102, 105–8
from test results, 98–99, 100
traditional approach to, 103–4
undervalued persons, giving chance to, 118–25
Taliesin, 69
Taylor, Shelley, 178
Teachers
burn-out, 160–61, 165–66
as givers, 101–2, 106–7, 160–78
self-fulfilling prophecy, 99–102
student potential, developing, 96–97, 101–2, 105–8
Teach for America (TFA), 159–62
Team Vanguard, 175
Teams and teamwork. See Collaboration
Tentative markers, in powerless speech, 144–46
Thompson, Wayne, 111, 115, 117–18
Tit for tat
generous tit for tat, 198–201
as matcher strategy, 198
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 242
Todd, Mary, 199
Traynham, Beth, potential, recognized by others, 95, 97, 105
Trumbull, Lyman, 11–14, 199–200
Trusting others, 189–94
empathy trap, 195–201
sincerity screening, 189–94
Tutu, Desmond, 184
Twain, Mark, 1, 10
U
Ultimatum game, 33
Up Your Giggy, 65
Uzzi, Brian, 30
V
Values, cross-cultural view, 20–21
Venture capitalists, as givers, 1–9, 17, 23–25
Virgin Unite, 184
Vitti, Jon, 77
Vohs, Kathleen, 183
Volkswagen, ads, success of, 142–46
Volunteers
and happiness, 183
hundred hour rule and happiness, 173–74
Vulnerability
and powerless communication, 151
and powerless speech, 133–35
W
Waal, Frans de, 223
Walker, Charls, 29
Walker, Larry, 156
Walker, Pinkney, 29
Wallaert, Matt, 265
Walter, Jorge, 50
Walton, Bill, 117, 119, 129
Walton, Dave, powerless communication style of, 126–29, 134–35, 141–42, 146
Ward, Elsie, 79
Wealth, -giving connection, 181–82
Webster, Gregory, 38
Weinberg, Larry, 122
Weiner, Jeff, 41
Weinstein, Dan, 44
Weinstein, Netta, 175
Welch, Jack, 128–29
Welle, Brian, 263
Weller, Thomas, 79, 82
Wentworth, John, 199–200
Westphal, James, 150
Wikipedia, 223
Willer, Rob, 34, 76, 218, 227
Williams, Evan, 31, 52
Wiseman, Liz, 63
Women
as givers versus men, 203–4n
glass ceiling, 201–3, 203–4n
Wonder Years, The, 62
Workplace
givers, fears of, 22–23, 241–43, 254–55
job crafting, 262–63
reciprocity patterns in, 5–6
Wright, Frank Lloyd
career ups and downs of, 67–69
collaborative style of, 69, 78
credit for work, claiming, 78, 92
dishonesty of, 68, 78
family motto of, 73
and perspective gap, 91–92, 92n
taker traits of, 67–70, 78
Wright, John, 68, 92
Wrzesniewski, Amy, 262–63
Wuthnow, Robert, 242
Y
Younger, Julius, 79–81
YouTube, 49
Yurochko, Francis, 79
Z
Zak, Sonya, 218
Zellman, Harold, 68
ZocDoc, 267
* Alan Fiske, an anthropologist at UCLA, finds that people engage in a mix of giving, taking, and matching in every human culture—from North to South America, Europe to Africa, and Australia to Asia. While living with a West African tribal group in Burkina Faso called the Mossi, Fiske found people switching between giving, taking, and matching. When it comes to land, the Mossi are givers. If you want to move into their village, they will automatically grant you land without expecting anything in return. But in the marketplace, the Mossi are more inclined toward taking, haggling aggressively for the best prices. And when it comes to cultivating food, the Mossi are likely to be matchers: everyone is expected to make an equal contribution, and meals are divided into even shares.
* Interestingly, in ultimatum games, it’s rare for the divider to propose anything that’s so lopsided. More than three quarters of dividers propose a perfectly even split, acting like matchers.
* In t
he computer industry study, when taker CEOs were at the helm, firms had more fluctuating, extreme performance, as measured by total shareholder returns and return on assets. They had bigger wins, but bigger losses. The takers were supremely confident in their bets, so they swung for the fences. They made bold, grandiose moves, which included more and larger acquisitions, as well as major upheavals to company strategy. Sometimes these moves paid off, but in the long run, the takers often put their companies in jeopardy. By contrast, new evidence shows that technology firms led by givers have higher returns on assets. Firms perform better when CEOs care more about the company’s success than their own and emphasize the importance of giving back.
* This is a nod to a “Weird Al” Yankovic song about nerds, which includes the line, “I’m fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon.” For the record, Rifkin worries about the amount of time that he has wasted in his life typing two spaces after a period, instead of one.
* Technically, since LinkedIn employees have a host of advantages in connecting with people on LinkedIn, insiders were excluded from the Fortune analysis. Unofficially, it is noteworthy that Rifkin topped every LinkedIn employee except two: founder Reid Hoffman and board member and investor David Sze.
* Of course, when takers and matchers give to receive, they do so with different aims. Takers are usually looking to get as much as possible, whereas matchers are motivated to maintain equal exchanges.
* Although my focus is on George Meyer, it’s important to acknowledge that the comedy on The Simpsons has always been a collective achievement. In particular, Meyer is quick to praise Jon Swartzwelder, who has written five dozen episodes, more than double any other writer in show history. Other contributors with many writing credits include Joel Cohen, John Frink, Dan Greaney, Al Jean, Tim Long, Ian Maxtone-Graham, Carolyn Omine, Don Payne, Matt Selman, and Jon Vitti. Of course, Meyer notes, this list doesn’t include the creators and many other writers, producers, and animators who have shaped the show’s success. Meyer started sharing credit early on. “In Army Man, I felt if people were going to write, they should get credit for it, especially since they were doing it for free.” He used a unique Army symbol to acknowledge each writer’s contribution. “It was a bad decision,” Meyer says, laughing, “because I had to cut all of them out with an X-Acto knife, and rubber-cement them to this board I was using. It was hard to find them in the pattern on my bedspread.”
* Many insiders believe that the credit-taking incident, coupled with the attention Salk gave to the media, was a major reason why the National Academy of Sciences never admitted Salk. But debate continues about why he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize. Some scientists have argued that although the polio vaccine made an invaluable applied contribution to public health, it wasn’t an original contribution to fundamental scientific knowledge.
* Is there a dark side to psychological safety? Many managers believe that by tolerating mistakes, they’re sending a message that it’s okay to make mistakes. Such mistakes might not be disastrous on a television sitcom, but consider a setting where lives are on the line: hospital units. Edmondson asked members of eight hospital units to rate how much psychological safety they felt in the unit, and how many medication errors they made. Sure enough, the higher the psychological safety, the greater the number of errors reported. In units where health care professionals felt their mistakes would be forgiven, they seemed more likely to deliver the wrong medication to patients, putting them at risk for ineffective treatment or allergic reactions. It makes intuitive sense that tolerance for errors would cause people to become complacent and make more errors, but Edmondson wasn’t convinced. She reasoned that psychological safety was increasing comfort with reporting errors, not causing errors. Sure enough, the higher a unit’s psychological safety, the more errors reported. But when Edmondson examined more objective, independent data on medication errors, the psychologically safe units didn’t actually make more errors. In fact, the higher the psychological safety in a unit, the fewer errors they made. Why? In the units that lacked psychological safety, health care professionals hid their errors, fearing retribution. As a result, they weren’t able to learn from their mistakes. In the units with high psychological safety, on the other hand, reporting errors made it possible to prevent them moving forward.
* Of course, my wife observed, our friends will love the candlesticks—they just didn’t know that such an exquisite gift existed. If they did, the candlesticks surely would have been on their registry. And she was right.
* Growing up as the oldest child in his family, Meyer had plenty of opportunities to practice perspective taking. Studies show that having younger siblings develops our giver instincts by providing experience with teaching, child care, feeding, and cleaning. Experts have long recognized that as older siblings, particularly if we’re the firstborn, we’re charged with taking care of our younger siblings, which requires acute attention to their unique needs and wants—and how they differ from our own. But Frank Lloyd Wright and Jonas Salk were firstborns: Wright had two younger sisters and Salk had two younger brothers. There’s something else in Meyer’s family background that may have nudged him in the giver direction. In a series of studies led by the Dutch psychologist Paul van Lange, givers had more siblings than the takers and matchers. The givers averaged two siblings; the takers and matchers averaged one and a half siblings. More siblings meant more sharing, which seemed to predispose people toward giving. It may not be a coincidence that George Meyer is the oldest of eight siblings. Interestingly, van Lange’s data showed a sister effect, not just a sibling effect. The givers didn’t have more brothers than the takers and matchers, but they were 50 percent more likely to have sisters. It is noteworthy that of Meyer’s seven younger siblings, five are sisters. For more on how female family members—even infants—might tilt us in the giver direction, see my article “Why Men Need Women” in the New York Times.
* Skender compulsively makes lists of everything, from his favorite songs to the ten best days of his life, and arranges the dollar bills in his wallet according to the order of their serial numbers. He owns more than eight hundred pairs of suspenders, each of which has a unique name and number. He alphabetizes his socks and his underwear and lays out his clothes weeks in advance. For more than two decades, he has worn a bow tie every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday—even when mowing his lawn. He is religious about being the first to arrive in his parking garage at work, usually before five A.M., yet he is known for staying past midnight at review sessions to help students prepare for exams. He translates his advice about reciprocity into the language of accounting: “I’d rather have a large accounts receivable than a large accounts payable.” To put his teaching load in perspective, a typical college professor teaches between three and eight classes a year. Over a career, that amounts to somewhere between one hundred and three hundred classes. Skender has nearly doubled this, and he recently told his dean that he intends to teach thirty-five more years. In calendar year 2012 alone, more than two thousand students took Skender’s courses. To accommodate the demand, the university once moved his class to a special oversized room away from the main campus. Even when he teaches early in the morning, his classroom is packed, and many more students wish they could enroll. For one eight A.M. class, he had 190 students on the waiting list.
* To be fair, Bowie’s career was hampered by injuries. In college, he missed two full seasons due to shin injuries. Before the draft, to make sure Bowie was completely healthy, Inman subjected him to a seven-hour physical examination. Bowie had a solid first season, but after that, injuries caused him to miss 81 percent of the games in the next four seasons, including nearly two entire seasons. And Inman and his scouts weren’t the only ones to bet on Bowie over Jordan. In June 1984, after the draft, a Chicago Tribune headline read “Apologetic Bulls ‘Stuck’ with Jordan.” The general manager of the Bulls, Rod Thorn, seemed disappointed. “We wish he were 7 feet, but he isn’t,” Thorn lamented. “There just wasn’t a center availabl
e. What can you do? Jordan isn’t going to turn this franchise around . . . He’s a very good offensive player, but not an overpowering offensive player.” Even Jordan seemed to endorse the Bowie selection: “Bowie fits in better than I would,” he said during his rookie year, as Portland had “an overabundance of big guards and small forwards.” Perhaps the best defense of Inman’s choice was offered by Ray Patterson, who ran the Houston Rockets in 1984, having selected Hakeem Olajuwon first in that draft before Bowie and Jordan: “Anybody who says they’d have taken Jordan over Bowie is whistling in the dark. Jordan just wasn’t that good.”
* Interestingly, Jordan’s basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, the legendary Dean Smith, had more of a giver style. Against his own interests, and strong resistance from his assistants, Smith advised Jordan to enter the NBA draft early, before his senior year. Smith had a rule: “We do what’s best for the player out of season and what’s best for the team in season.” As NBA salaries skyrocketed, Smith encouraged every player who had a good shot at being picked in the top five or ten to leave college early and secure his financial future, as long as he promised to come back and finish his education later. In his thirty-six years as head coach, Smith sent nine athletes to the draft early, and seven made good on their promises. Although Smith was encouraging his best players to leave the team, putting his players’ interests first seemed to help him recruit top talent and build trust and loyalty. Smith retired with 879 wins, then more than any coach in NCAA history; his teams made eleven Final Fours and won two national championships. As Chris Granger, executive vice president at the NBA, explains, “Talented people are attracted to those who care about them. When you help someone get promoted out of your team, it’s a short-term loss, but it’s a clear long-term gain. It’s easier to attract people, because word gets around that your philosophy is to help people.”
