Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

Good returns

• & David Hornik
• & Danny Shader
  • In 1999, his first start-up, Accept.com, was acquired by Amazon for $175 million. In 2007, his next company, Good Technology, was acquired by Motorola for $500 million.
• Entrepreneurs look for the same attributes in investors that we all seek in financial advisers: competence and trustworthiness

Motivation, Ability, Opportunity, and Network

• “According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common:

1. motivation
2. Ability
3. Opportunity
4. Critical but often neglected: success depends heavily on how we approach our interactions with other people.
   • Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return?”

Reciprocity Defined

• Takers have a distinctive signature: they like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting their own interests ahead of others’ needs. Takers believe that the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place. They feel that to succeed, they need to be better than others. To prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure they get plenty of credit for their efforts. Garden-variety takers aren’t cruel or cutthroat; they’re just cautious and self-protective. “If I don’t look out for myself first,” takers think, “no one will.
• Givers and Takers aren’t distinguished by how much they donate to charity or the compensation that they command from their employers. Rather, givers and takers differ in their attitudes and actions toward other people.
  • Being a giver doesn’t require extraordinary acts of sacrifice. It just involves a focus on acting in the interests of others, such as by giving help, providing mentoring, sharing credit, or making connections for others.
• Professionally, few of us act purely like givers or takers, adopting a third style:
  • We become Matchers, striving to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting. Matchers operate on the principle of fairness: when they help others, they protect themselves by seeking reciprocity. If you’re a matcher, you believe in tit for tat, and your relationships are governed by even exchanges of favors.
• The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.

Reciprocity in action

Politics is a ‘getting’ business. You have to get support, contributions, and votes, over and over again.” — ” former President & Bill Clinton

• When experts in history, political science, and psychology rated the presidents, they identified Lincoln as a clear giver. “Even if it was inconvenient, Lincoln went out of his way to help others,” wrote two experts, demonstrating “obvious concern for the well-being of individual citizens."
• “This is one important feature of giving to keep in mind as we move through the ideas in this book: on any particular morning, giving may well be incompatible with success. In purely zero-sum situations and win-lose interactions, giving rarely pays off. This is a lesson that Abraham Lincoln learned each time he chose to give to others at his own expense”

“If I have one vice and I can call it nothing else—it is not to be able to say no!” — Abraham Lincoln

• But most of life isn’t zero-sum, and on balance, people who choose giving as their primary reciprocity style end up reaping rewards
• It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success. In fact, you’ll see that in sales and medical school, the giver advantage grows over time. In the long run, giving can be every bit as powerful as it is dangerous. As Chip Conley, the renowned entrepreneur who founded Joie de Vivre Hotels, explains...

“Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.”

• { Leadership, Strategies, and Tactics#^42bbfa
• According to Hornik, a successful venture capitalist is “a service provider. Entrepreneurs are not here to serve venture capitalists. We are here to serve entrepreneurs.”
• “This giver advantage in service roles is hardly limited to medicine. Steve Jones, the award-winning former CEO of one of the largest banks in Australia, wanted to know what made financial advisers successful. His team studied key factors such as financial expertise and effort. But “the single most influential factor,” Jones told me, “was whether a financial adviser had the client’s best interests at heart, above the company’s and even his own. It was one of my three top priorities to get that value instilled, and demonstrate that it’s in everybody’s best interests to treat clients that way.”

Guiding principles

“Takers favor the values in List 1, whereas givers prioritize the values in List 2. ” — & Shalom Schwartz

1. “List 1:

• Wealth (money, material possessions)
• Power (dominance, control over others)
• Pleasure (enjoying life)
• Winning (doing better than others)

2. 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)

• 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.

• People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum.

“When they anticipate self-interested behavior from others,” 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.” — & Dale Miller, Stanford psychologist
The fear of exploitation by takers is so pervasive 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.” — & Robert Frank, Cornell economist

The Peacock and the Panda

• According to & Brian Uzzi, a management professor at Northwestern University, networks come with three major advantages:

1. Private information
2. Diverse skills
3. 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. How do people relate to others in their networks, and what do they see as the purpose of networking?
• “Can people build up networks that have breadth and depth using different reciprocity styles? Or does one style consistently create a richer network?”

It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship. If you set out to help others, you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities.” — LinkedIn founder & Reid Hoffman

• Takers want to be admired by influential superiors, so they go out of their way to charm and flatter. As a result, powerful people tend to form glowing first impressions of takers.
• A trio of German psychologists found that when strangers first encountered people, the ones they liked most were those “with a sense of entitlement and a tendency to manipulate and exploit others.”
• { Leadership, Strategies, and Tactics#^42bbfa

takers experiment

• “In another study spearheaded by & Daniel Kahneman, people had a choice between splitting $12 evenly with a taker who had made an unfair proposal in the past or splitting $10 evenly with a matcher who had made a fair proposal in the past. More than 80 percent of the people preferred to split $10 evenly with the matcher, accepting $5 rather than $6 to prevent the taker from getting $6.”

  • { Never Split the Difference

• New research shows that when people get burned by takers, they punish them by sharing reputational information.

“Gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment. — social scientists & Matthew Feinberg, & Joey Cheng, and & Robb Willer.

• “If we create networks with the sole intention of getting something, we won’t succeed. We can’t pursue the benefits of networks; the benefits ensue from investments in meaningful activities and relationships.”

Signs of a taker

• Since takers tend to be self-absorbed, they’re more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, me, mine, my, and myself—versus first-person plural pronouns like we, us, our, ours, and ourselves.
• Taker CEO pay earned far more money than other senior executives in their companies. The takers saw themselves as superior, so they felt entitled to substantial pay discrepancies in their own favor.

Transparent Network

• Social networks have always existed. It is only recently that the Internet has provided a venue for their electronic explosion. . . . From mundane communication to meeting the love of one’s life to inciting political revolutions, network ties are the conduits by which information and resources are spread.” — psychologists Benjamin Crosier, Gregory Webster, and Haley Dillon.

What goes around comes around

• In 2011, Adam Rifkin had more LinkedIn connections to the 640 powerful people on Fortune’s lists than any human being on the planet.
• Adam Rifkin built his network by operating as a bona fide giver. “My network developed little by little, in fact a little every day through small gestures and acts of kindness, over the course of many years,” Rifkin explains, “with a desire to make better the lives of the people I’m connected to.” Since 1994, Rifkin has served as a leader and watchdog in a wide range of online communities, working diligently to strengthen relationships and help people resolve online conflicts. As the cofounder of Renkoo, a start-up with Joyce Park, Rifkin created applications that were used more than 500 million times by more than 36 million people on Facebook and Myspace.
• Helped out the founder of Blogger, ends up helping & Evan Williams stay afloat as he founds Twitter.

“You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”

“When you have nothing, what’s the first thing you try to do? You try to make a connection and have a relationship that gives you an opportunity to do something for someone else.”

• **Rifkin gives a lot more than he receives is a key point: **
  • takers and matchers also give in the context of networks, but they tend to give strategically, with an expected personal return that exceeds or equals their contributions. When takers and matchers network, they tend to focus on who can help them in the near future, and this dictates what, where, and how they give.
    • Their actions tend to exploit a common practice in nearly all societies around the world, in which people typically subscribe to a norm of reciprocity: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you help me, I’m indebted to you, and I feel obligated to repay.
  • “According to the psychologist & Robert Cialdini, people can capitalize on this norm of reciprocity by giving what they want to receive.

Downsides to reciprocity

1. People on the receiving end often feel like they’re being manipulated.
   - “Do you really care about helping me, or are you just trying to create quid pro quo so that you can ask for a favor?”
2. Matchers tend to build smaller networks than either givers, who seek actively to help a wider range of people, or takers, who often find themselves expanding their networks to compensate for bridges burned in previous transactions.
   • Many matchers operate based on the attitude of “I’ll do something for you, if you’ll do something for me,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, so they “limit themselves to deals in which their immediate benefit is at least as great as the benefits for others . . . If you insist on a quid pro quo every time you help others, you will have a much narrower network.”
   • When matchers give with the expectation of receiving, they direct their giving toward people who they can help them.

• As these disadvantages of strict reciprocity accrue over time, they can limit both the quantity and quality of the networks that takers and matchers develop.

The Ripple Effect

The history of & George Meyer

• “A rare bright spot in his college career was being elected president of The Harvard Lampoon, the famous comedy magazine, but it was quickly tarnished by an attempted coup. ”
  • “After being elected president of the Lampoon, when peers attempted to depose him, Owen notes that “Meyer not only survived that coup but also, characteristically, became a close friend of his principal rival.”
• “In 1981, at the recommendation of two friends, Meyer sent a few writing samples to a new NBC show called Late Night with David Letterman.”

• George Meyer is the mastermind of much of the humor on The Simpsons, the longest-running sitcom and animated program in America.”
  • A show created by & Matt Groening
  • Writer & Jon Vitti was as producer on the office

  “Meyer is “the one in the room who writes more of the show than anyone else—his fingerprints are on nearly every script. He exerts as much influence on the show as anyone can without being one of the creators.”

“In { Multipliers, former Oracle executive & Liz Wiseman distinguishes between geniuses and genius makers. Geniuses tend to be takers: to promote their own interests, they “drain intelligence, energy, and capability” from others. Genius makers tend to be givers: they use their “intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities” of other people, Wiseman writes, such that “lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved.”

“Collaboration and Creative Character”

• A Berkeley psychologist named & Donald MacKinnon launched a path-breaking study. He wanted to identify the unique characteristics of highly creative people in art, science, and business, so he studied a group of people whose work involves all three fields: architects.”
  • One group of architects emerged as significantly more “responsible, sincere, reliable, dependable,” with more “good character” and “sympathetic concern for others” than the other.
    • #comment (Need relation) The karma prince suggests that it should be the creative architects, but it wasn’t.
    • It was the ordinary architects. MacKinnon found that the creative architects stood out as substantially more “demanding, aggressive, and self-centered” than the comparison group.
    • The creative architects had whopping egos and responded aggressively and defensively to criticism.
    • In later studies, the same patterns emerged from comparisons of creative and less creative scientists: the creative scientists scored significantly higher in dominance, hostility, and psychopathic deviance.
    • Highly creative scientists were rated by observers as creating and exploiting dependency in others. Even the highly creative scientists themselves agreed with statements like “I tend to slight the contribution of others and take undue credit for myself”

Why is Meyer a giver?

• In 1995, The Simpsons won a Genesis Award from the Humane Society for raising public awareness of animal issues.
• “Meyer is a vegetarian who practices yoga, and in 2005 he cowrote Earth to America, a TBS special that utilized comedy as a vehicle for raising awareness about global warming and related environmental issues.”

• Through his writing & George Meyer was able to help others (Givers)
• Meyer wrote and self-published a humor magazine called Army Man
  • Like a Givers, he gave away his best comedy, sending copies to about two hundred friends for free
    • Meyer wrote Arm Man, which he gave to his friends/collegues, which got in the hands of the producer for the Simpsons (& Sam Simon), which then opened the opportnity for helping more people through his writing.
• He knew his performance was interdependent, not independent: his ability to make people laugh was due in part to collaborating with fellow comedy writers. So he reached out to people who had worked with him at the Lampoon and on his past shows, inviting them to contribute to Army Man.”

Excerpt From: Grant Ph.D., Adam M. “B00AFPTSI0 EBOK.” Apple Books.

Flying Solo: & Frank Lloyd Wright

background

• “In 1991, Wright was recognized as the greatest American architect of all time by the American Institute of Architects.

Buildings

• Fallingwater house

• near Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum, and more than a thousand other structures—roughly half of which were built.

A fall from the top

In a career that spanned seven decades, he completed an average of more than 140 designs and 70 structures per decade

• However, between 1924 and 1933, he only completed 2 projects
• Wright was one of the architects invited to participate in & Donald MacKinnon's study of creativity — he declined
• Experts believe that as an apprentice, Wright designed at least nine bootleg houses, violating the terms of his contract that prohibited independent work. To hide the illegal work, Wright reportedly persuaded one of his fellow draftsmen to sign off on several of the houses.
• When John asked him to be paid, Wright sent him a bill itemizing the total amount of money that John had cost over the course of his life, from birth to the present.
• Wright operated interdependently with apprentices - however, he leaned on them to do the work
• According to management guru & Peter Drucker, these “{ The Effective Executive - The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done#^12699d knowledge workers, unlike manual workers in manufacturing, own the means of production: they carry that knowledge in their heads and can therefore take it with them.”

Working with a consistent crew: Sharing the process and the success

• Even though successful financial analysts were supposed to be individual stars, their performance wasn’t portable.
  • When star analysts moved to a different firm, their performance dropped, and it stayed lower for at least five years. In the first year after the move, the star analysts were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first, 6 percent less likely to be ranked second, 1 percent less likely to be ranked third, and 6 percent more likely to be unranked. Even five years after the move, the stars were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first and 8 percent more likely to be unranked.
  • On average, firms lost about $24 million by hiring star analysts.
    • & Boris Groysberg and his colleagues conclude that “hiring stars is advantageous neither to stars themselves, in terms of their performance, nor to hiring companies in terms of their market value.”
      • “The star analysts relied on knowledgeable colleagues for information and new ideas”

If Frank Lloyd Wright had been more of a giver than a taker, could he have avoided the nine years in which his income and reputation plummeted? George Meyer thinks so.

I Wish I Could Hate You

The juxtaposition of George Meyer with Frank Lloyd Wright reveals how givers and takers think differently about success.

According to research by a trio of Stanford psychologists, Americans see independence as a symbol of strength, viewing interdependence as a sign of weakness. This is particularly true of takers, who tend to see themselves as superior to and separate from others. If they depend too much on others, takers believe, they’ll be vulnerable to being outdone”

• #comment I do this a lot. I spend a lot of time coming to conclusions, but fail to share them with others out of fear that someone will go off and do somehting before me.
  • What if I did share did share those ideas? What could come from it?
  • instead of harboring ideas - sheltering them from others - let's share them. When some can learn something from someone else, they create better relationships 202108012047 - The power of relationships
  • Because we are givers, which help us build strong teams, does this means that givers are good leaders?
    • What are examples of good leaders? Who are good leaders through history?