Summary: Give and Take

Review and Analysis of Grant's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782511035887
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Adam Grant's book: `Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Adam Grant's book `Give and Take` shows how success depends on how you interact with others.
In the world of work, there are three types of people: takers, who maximise reward from every transaction, matchers; who give only as much as they take, and givers, who help others expecting nothing in return. The type of person you are at work has a huge impact on your future. According to Grant, givers are the people that achieve the greatest success.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Become a giver and avoid being taken advantage of
• Enhance your career

To learn more, read “Give and Take” and learn how becoming a giver can lead to greater success!

Summary of Give and Take (Adam Grant)

1. Why and how givers rise to the top

Successful givers have unique and distinctive approaches to the four key activities of the modern business world:

1. Network
2. Collaborate Givers
3. Evaluate Givers
4. Influence Givers

Success!

Thanks to the distinctive way they network, collaborate, evaluate and seek to influence, givers often rise to the top of the business world. Even if you're not a giver by nature, picking up on what they do so well has the potential to enhance your own career as well. Givers are doing something right so learn and benefit

1. Network Givers

Networking is good. It gives three major advantages:

1. Access to private information.
2. Availability of diverse skills.
3. Access to power and influence.

Givers, matchers and takers build and manage their personal networks in fundamentally different ways:

• Takers by-and-large tend to approach networking as solely a numbers game. The more people they can get, the better. They go out of their way to demonstrate their self-importance. Takers are always highly self-absorbed so their approach to networking is to use the group to illuminate all the good stuff they're doing. Takers like to rack up a large number of superficial connections so they can advertise their accomplishments and look important.
• Matchers build networks primarily so they can get favors. They do nice things for the people in their network in anticipation of being able to call on them to reciprocate in the future.
• Givers have a very different mindset when they network. They're looking for opportunities to help other people get ahead. Most givers also know and acknowledge that over the long haul, nature has a way of balancing the ledger – which is kind of nice – but in more immediate terms, they network to help others without expecting anything in return.

“I want to improve the world, and I want to smell good while doing it."

- Adam Rifkin, rated as the "best networker in the world" by Fortune Magazine

Prolific givers like Adam Rifkin network pure and simple so they can find people to help. They form lots of ties which can be designated in three different ways:

Ties formed when networking

1. Strong
2. Weak
3. Dormant

1. Strong ties – friends and colleagues you trust and interact with frequently.
2. Weak ties – acquaintances or the people you know casually or by reputation.
3. Dormant ties – where you got to know someone in the past but since then have not really had any contact with them.

Givers succeed over the long run because they are so focused on adding value for all the people in their network that they reconnect with their weak ties and even their dormant ties on an ongoing basis. Those reconnections have a way of generating new and novel information which can be very beneficial.

“You should be willing to do something that will take five minutes or less for anybody.”

- Adam Rifkin

Rifkin has the mindset he is willing to do a five-minute favor for anyone and everyone he meets. Rather than expecting people to pay him back for his help, Rifkin encourages them to pay it forward and to go out and find someone else to help. Those favors create a ripple effect that radiates outwards and hopefully adds value to society. That exemplifies how givers approach networking.

It would be natural to assume all that giving must impact negatively on the giver's level of personal productivity. Yet in one extensive study, it was shown quite definitively that networkers who are consistent givers are in fact highly productive. Why? By giving so much, they build up more trust with their peers and get more help from those in their work groups. In a nice kind of cosmic karma, the boost which comes in from those sources more than compensates for the amount of time and effort the giver uses in helping others.

“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.”

- Reif Hoffman, founder, LinkedIn

“Givers gain.”

- Ivan Misner, founder and chairman of BNI, the world's largest business networking organization

“I'll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Book Presentation
• Summary
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright