Authors: Adam M. Grant Ph.D.
When the groups included one consistent giver, the other members contributed more. The presence of a single giver was enough to establish a norm of giving. By giving, participants were able to make their group members better off and managed to get more in the process. Even though they earned 50 percent less from each contribution, because they inspired others to give, they made a larger total sum available to all participants. The givers raised the bar and expanded the pie for the whole group.
In this experiment, the consistent givers were doing the equivalent of a five-minute favor when they contributed their money every round. They were making small sacrifices to benefit each member of the group, and it inspired the group members to do the same. Through the five-minute favor, Rifkin is expanding the pie for his whole network. In 106 Miles, the norm is for all five thousand entrepreneurs to help one another. Rifkin explains that “you’re not doing somebody a favor because you’re getting something in return. The goal of the group is to instill the value of giving: you don’t have to be transactional about it, you don’t have to trade it. If you do something for somebody in the group, then when you need it, someone in the group will do something for you.”
For takers and matchers, this type of relentless giving still seems a bit risky. Can givers like Adam Rifkin maintain their productivity, especially when there are no guarantees that their help will come back around to benefit them directly? To shed light on this question, Stanford professor Frank Flynn studied
professional engineers
at a large telecommunications firm in the Bay Area. He asked the engineers to rate themselves and one another on how much they gave and received help from one another, which allowed him to identify which engineers were givers, takers, and matchers. He also asked each engineer to rate the status of ten other engineers: how much respect did they have?
The takers had the lowest status. They burned bridges by constantly asking for favors but rarely reciprocating. Their colleagues saw them as selfish and punished them with a lack of respect. The givers had the highest status, outdoing the matchers and takers. The more generous they were, the more respect and prestige they earned from their colleagues. Through giving more than they got, givers signaled their unique skills, demonstrated their value, and displayed their good intentions.
Despite being held in the highest esteem, the givers faced a problem: they paid a productivity price. For three months, Flynn measured the quantity and quality of work completed by each engineer. The givers were more productive than the takers: they worked harder and got more done. But the matchers had the highest productivity, beating out the givers. The time that the givers devoted to helping their colleagues apparently detracted from their ability to finish jobs, reports, and drawings. The matchers were more likely to call in favors and receive help, and it appeared to keep them on track. On the face of it, this seems like a stumbling block to the giver style of networking. If givers sacrifice their productivity by helping others, how can it be worth it?
Yet Adam Rifkin has managed to be a giver and stay highly productive as the cofounder of several successful companies. How does he avoid the tradeoff between giving and productivity? He gives more.
In the study of engineers, the givers didn’t always pay a productivity price. Flynn measured whether the engineers were givers, matchers, or takers by asking their colleagues to rate whether they gave more, the same, or less than they received. This meant that some engineers could score as givers even if they didn’t help others very often, as long as they asked for less in return. When Flynn examined the data based on how often the engineers gave and received help, the givers only took a productivity dive when they gave infrequently. Of all engineers, the most productive were those who gave often—and gave more than they received. These were the true givers, and they had the highest productivity and the highest status: they were revered by their peers. By giving often, engineers built up more trust and attracted more valuable help from across their work groups—not just from the people they helped.
This is exactly what has happened to Adam Rifkin with his five-minute favors. In the days before social media, Rifkin might have toiled in anonymity. Thanks to the connected world, his reputation as a giver has traveled faster than the speed of sound. “It takes him no time to raise funding for his start-ups,” Rouf says with a trace of astonishment. “He has such a great reputation; people know he’s a good guy. That’s a dividend that gets paid because of who he is.”
Rifkin’s experience illustrates how givers are able to develop and leverage extraordinarily rich networks. By virtue of the way they interact with other people in their networks, givers create norms that favor adding rather than claiming or trading value, expanding the pie for all involved. When they truly need help, givers can reconnect with dormant ties, receiving novel assistance from near-forgotten but trusted sources. “I’ll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity,” writes Keith Ferrazzi. “If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.” Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Ivan Misner, the founder and chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization, needs just two words to describe his guiding philosophy: “Givers gain.”
After years of rearranging the letters in his name, Adam Rifkin has settled on the perfect anagram:
I Find Karma
.
The Ripple Effect
Collaboration and the Dynamics of Giving and Taking Credit
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
—John Andrew Holmes, former U.S. representative and senator
You probably don’t recognize
George Meyer
’s name, but you’re definitely familiar with his work. In fact, odds are that someone close to you is a big fan of his ideas, which have captivated an entire generation of people around the world. Although I didn’t know it belonged to him until recently, I’ve admired his work since I was nine years old. Meyer is a tall, angular man in his mid-fifties who sports long, stringy hair and a goatee. If you ran into him on the street, you wouldn’t be able to place his face, but you might have a hunch that he’s a Grateful Dead fan. You’d be right: in the last five years of Jerry Garcia’s life, Meyer attended at least seventy different Grateful Dead concerts.
Meyer attended college at Harvard, where he was nearly suspended after he sold a refrigerator to a freshman and accepted payment, but never delivered it. He was almost suspended again when he used an electric guitar to shatter a window of a dorm room. 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. According to journalist David Owen, Meyer’s peers “tried to overthrow him in a bitter and vituperative internal battle, because they thought he wasn’t responsible enough.”
After graduating from college in 1978, Meyer moved back home and looked for ways to earn quick cash. He spent much of his time in college gambling on dog races at a greyhound track, so he thought he might be able to make a career out of it. He parked himself at a public library and began analyzing scientific strategies for beating the system. It didn’t work: after two weeks, he ran out of money.
Three decades later, George Meyer is one of the most successful people in show business. He has been a major contributor to a movie that grossed more than $527 million. He has won seven Emmy Awards and invented several words that have entered English dictionaries—one of which was uttered every day by my college roommate for four years. But he is most celebrated for his role in a television phenomenon that has changed the world. Insiders maintain that as much as any other person, he is responsible for the success of the show that
Time
magazine named the single best television series of the twentieth century.
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
. “Everything in his submission, down to the last little detail, was so beautifully honed,” Letterman gushed to Owen. “I haven’t run across anybody quite like that since.” During the first season, Meyer invented what was to become one of Letterman’s signature routines: using a steam roller to crush ordinary objects, like pieces of fruit. After two years with Letterman, Meyer left to work on
The New Show
with Lorne Michaels and then joined
Saturday Night Live
, departing in 1987 to write a script for a Letterman movie that was ultimately shelved.
When Meyer’s two friends recommended him to Letterman, they called him “the funniest man in America.” This wasn’t a statement to be taken lightly—the two went on to become an Emmy-winning pair of comedy writers on shows like
Seinfeld
,
The Wonder Years
, and
Monk
. And if you look at what George Meyer has accomplished since he finished the Letterman movie script, you might be inclined to agree with them.
George Meyer is the mastermind of much of the humor on
The Simpsons
, the longest-running sitcom and animated program in America.
The Simpsons
has won twenty-seven prime-time Emmy Awards, six of which went to Meyer, and changed the face of animated comedy. Although Meyer didn’t launch
The Simpsons—
it was created by Matt Groening and developed with James L. Brooks and Sam Simon—there is widespread consensus that Meyer was the most important force behind the show’s success. Meyer was hired to write for
The Simpsons
before it premiered in 1989, and he was a major contributor for sixteen seasons as a writer and executive producer. Meyer “has so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of
The Simpsons
could be viewed as mostly his,” writes Owen. According to humor writer Mike Sacks, “Meyer is largely considered among the writing staff to be its behind-the-scenes genius among geniuses,” the man “responsible for the best lines and jokes.” Jon Vitti, one of the original
Simpsons
writers who authored many of the early episodes and later served as a producer on
The Office
, elaborated that 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.”
How does a man like George Meyer become so successful in collaborative work? Reciprocity styles offer a powerful lens for explaining why some people flourish in teams while others fail. 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.” My goal in this chapter is to explore how these differences between givers and takers affect individual and group success.
When we consider what it takes to attain George Meyer’s level of comedic impact, there’s little question that creativity is a big part of the equation. Carolyn Omine, a longtime
Simpsons
writer and producer, says that Meyer “has a distinct way of looking at the world. It’s completely unique.” Executive producer and show-runner Mike Scully once commented that when he first joined
The Simpsons
, Meyer “just blew me away. I had done a lot of sitcom work before, but George’s stuff was so different and so original that for a while I wondered if I wasn’t in over my head.”
To unlock the mystery of how people become highly creative, back in 1958, 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. To start, MacKinnon and his colleagues asked five independent architecture experts to submit a list of the forty most creative architects in the United States. Although they never spoke to one another, the experts achieved remarkably high consensus. They could have nominated up to two hundred architects in total, but after accounting for overlap, their lists featured just eighty-six. More than half of those architects were nominated by more than one expert, more than a third by the majority of the experts, and 15 percent by all five experts.
From there, forty of the country’s most creative architects agreed to be dissected psychologically. MacKinnon’s team compared them with eighty-four other architects who were successful but not highly creative, matching the creative and “ordinary” architects on age and geographic location. All of the architects traveled to Berkeley, where they spent three full days opening up their minds to MacKinnon’s team, and to science. They filled out a battery of personality questionnaires, experienced stressful social situations, took difficult problem-solving tests, and answered exhaustive interview questions about their entire life histories. MacKinnon’s team pored over mountains of data, using pseudonyms for each architect so they would remain blind to who was highly creative and who was not.
One group of architects emerged as significantly more “responsible, sincere, reliable, dependable,” with more “good character” and “sympathetic concern for others” than the other. The karma principle 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” and “I tend to be sarcastic and disparaging in describing the worth of other researchers.”