There are three types of relational styles in the business world: givers, matchers, and takers. Givers are people who help others without any expectation of getting anything in return. Matchers try to keep the score even, preferring not to ask or give favors unless necessary. Takers, obviously, try to milk the system and take more than they give. Grant argues that statistically givers end up with the best outcomes, essentially because they create large networks of people who trust the giver. Since most people are matchers, they will be looking for opportunities to do return the favor. The giver will also be seen positively and have high trust within his network—even if they were just a one-off favor or they have not spoken in a while—so if the giver needs a favor, they will typically be eager to help out. Furthermore, there are studies showing that the presence of just one giver in a group causes more people in the group to give, so although a giving style may receive less back from each individual interaction, they will have more successful interactions and end up receiving substantially more.

Matchers, are inherently limited in the connections they can build because they increase their network only when they need a favor or someone asks them. Over time, this slower growth compared to the giver compounds and leads to substantially smaller networks. The takers initially look successful, but eventually their network learns that they are a taker. Matchers tend to want to punish givers (even if it comes at their own expense), and healthy givers tend to minimize their interactions with takers. This leads the taker to need to move to a new network where no one knows them yet.

Adam Rifkin, a wildly successful Silicon Valley giver, says that he lives by the rule that you should always be willing to do a five-minute favor for anyone, whether you know them or not.

We can learn to become givers. George Meyer, one of the writers for The Simpsons, initially saw other writers as competitors, but eventually realized that writing in Hollywood was a small world, and that most of the jobs you got were through recommendations. He become well-known as a giver and collaborator. He would often have to cut a writer’s joke from a show. Psychologically we tend to overestimate the amount of effort we put in compared to the other person (which is why three out of couples, when asked what percent each person puts into the relationship, add up to more than 100). Meyer avoided that by remembering how he felt when one of his first jokes was cut—he was livid—when he communicated it.

Frank Lloyd Wright took the opposite approach of Meyer. He worked by himself, not terribly successfully, until his wife suggested that he get some apprentices. This led to his most productive period. But after a client commented that the apprentices were equally talented but more conscientious, he became jealous and required that they sign their work with his name. The junior writers that worked with Meyers tended to become successful themselves, but few of Wright’s apprentices became successful.

Givers also tend to identify talent better, and avoid over-investing in mistakes. Intuitively it seems that raw talent is the predictor for greatest success (e.g. in sports or music), but analysis has shown that it is actually motivation that is more important. The motivated child / person will seek out the instruction they need and invest the time to become excellent. Givers are more able to identify talent in the rough because they tend to see excellence in everyone and look for the motivation, while matchers wait until the excellence is visible. Givers also tend to be more willing to let go of their mistakes in judgment. Since their ego is not attached, and they are concerned about the good for the team or for others that they could develop, givers will reduce their investment as it becomes clear that they made a mistake. Takers, on the other hand, tend to keep giving their mistakes chances to redeem themselves, because this person was their choice and admitting that they made a mistake is hard on their ego.

Givers are more able to influence people than matchers or takers. There are two ways to influence people: dominance (getting others to believe we are strong, powerful, authoritative and competent) and prestige (gaining admiration and respect from people). Dominance can work well in a one-shot situation, like a job interview, especially for a leadership position. However, prestige works better in most other situations, like teaching a class, or even sales. As long as your audience sees you as competent, showing some vulnerability will humanize you and make you more likeable. Grant talks about a trial attorney who discovered that his slight stutter made the jury like him, since it made them sympathetic (especially someone with a stutter doing high-stress public speaking like a trial lawyer) and between that and his argument, he won the case. Grant also relates a personal experience teaching to career Air Force colonels in their fifties, while he was half their age, having just graduated with his Ph.D. When he tried to establish his credentials, the audience did not like him, because they saw him as a young guy with no experience. But when he started off saying “I know what you’re thinking, how can someone who is twelve teach me anything”, they joked that he had to be at least thirteen, and he got rave reviews, even though the course material was essentially the same. (Research shows that vulnerability works against you if the audience sees you as less than competent.) Similarly, salespeople whose technique was to ask about the customer’s need to figure out how to best serve them way out-performed salespeople who tried to sell the product. The givers who sought the good of the customer were able to figure out what the customer actually needed and recommend products and solutions that met the need, even when the customer was initially skeptical. Similarly, asking advice is a good way of gaining influence. One woman was taking MBA night classes and her company insisted on transferring her to a different location. She could not continue her classes in the new location, but she could not afford to quit her job for the MBA. So she asked her manager for advice on what he would do. Because he wanted to keep her, he asked around, and the department head offered her a seat on the company plane, which flew between the two locations. Grant calls these approaches “powerless communication”, and they humanize you (vulnerability), show that you desire the other person’s success, and invite the other person to consider a different perspective (advice).

Grant identifies two types of givers, selfless givers and “otherish” givers. The otherish givers have both strong desires and motivations for helping others as well as strong desires and goals for themselves. It turns out that otherish givers end up giving far more than selfless givers, because the selfless givers end up burning out because they do not get what fills them up. Grant illustrates with the example of Conrey Callahan, a Teach For America teacher to a very rough inner-city school in Philadelphia. Like the rest of her cohort that started at the same time, Conrey quickly burned out from long hours, breaking up fights, etc. However, what she did was start mentoring other TFA teachers as well as mentoring high-achieving kids on Saturdays. Although she was not actually giving more, she recovered from her burnout (unlike the rest of her cohort), because the extra giving allowed her to see immediate fruit, which refreshed and energized her. Grant finds several principles in giving. The first, is that people need to see the purpose in giving. For instance, technicians examining CT scans performed better with a picture of the patient, because it made their work meaningful, and mentoring high-achievers allowed Callahan to see near-term improvements in the students. The second is that giving improves the giver’s sense of well-being if they do it because they want to do it, not out of duty. The corollary here is that it is more effective to chunk your giving into, say, Saturday, when you are refreshed, rather than spreading it out over the week. The third is that giving 100 hours a year (two hours a week) is a good target—giving beyond that appears to have no additional benefits to the giver. Grant also identifies a possible fourth principle, in that there seems to be a correlation between giving more and earning more—those who give more seem to also earn more, and it may be that the increased giving causes the increased earning.

To be effective, givers need to move from becoming selfless—doormats and pushovers—to otherish. One piece of information that helps is that while people associate the psychological characteristic of agreeableness with generosity, there is actually no correlation. Both agreeable and disagreeable people have giver styles of relating. (Similarly, both men and women are equally likely to be givers, but women are more likely to give in close relationships and men are more likely to give to strangers.) Just because someone is agreeable does not mean that they are a giver—they might just as well be a taker. One technique that helps buffer against misjudging someone is to relate with a “generous tit-for-tat” strategy. Tit-for-tat starts off giving, continuing if the other person continues, but competes if the other person competes; basically mirroring the other person, in a trust-but-verify strategy. The generous tit-for-tat will ignore a non-giving play about one-third of the time and be giving anyway. This outperforms regular tit-for-tat because it tends to make the other person feel in debt to the giver and discourages further taking and encourages giving.

Givers tend to be at a disadvantage in negotiations because they tend to put the other person’s interests first. So it is important to maintain an “otherish” perspective. Women tend to earn less money than men at equivalent jobs not because they were offered less, but because the men were willing to ask for more money. When women were advised to look at the negotiation as if they were a mentor of themselves negotiating the salary (basically advocating on behalf of “someone else”), they were just as successful as the men. One giver got better at salary negotiations by looking at the negotiation from the perspective of his family, not himself only. The author also used a similar technique to land record sales at a job during college. When clients were upset and wanted to reduce their advertising spending, or when a downturn came, he was successful in landing sales by realizing that it was not a zero sum game; both sides could win. By thinking from the client’s perspective about what his company could offer to sweeten the pot that would also benefit the client, but not cost more money, he was able to land his largest sale despite a slow economy.

There are more givers than one might think in an organization, but frequently everyone thinks that only takers succeed, so they act in perceived self-preservation and think they are alone. However, it is possible to create organizations with a giver culture. There are four things that help in creating a giver culture. The first is that group identity makes people much more likely to give. On a Manchester campus, if someone slipped in front of them, 93% helped if the person who slipped was wearing a Manchester United t-shirt, compared to 33% for a plain t-shirt. The group identity is much stronger if it relatively rare: there are twice as many dentists named Dennis as there are Jerry. People want to feel connected, so they want to be part of a group, but we also want to be unique, so we gravitate towards something more specific. The second thing is that people are motivated by something that is actually achievable. Writing about Superman before a meeting to give makes people four times less likely to show up than writing about “a superhero”, because Superman has human features that are simply unachievable, so why try. So people are more likely to save electricity if that can do something small. But if you ask them to join their neighbors in helping save electricity, they save a lot more than if you tell them it will save money. The third thing is that people’s identity comes more from what they actually do than what their attitude is—"I give, therefore I must be a giver”. Freecycle is a website where people give away things for free, no strings attached. Unlike Craigslist, where you sell your goods and the relationship is purely transactional, Freecycle creates the impression that the giver has the interest of the person they are giving to (there are no strings attached). But, also, seeing the thankfulness of the recipient and how it helps them is also a powerful motivator for the giver. As a result, people who give and receive things on Freecycle beyond just a few things report being much more a part of a community than people on Craigslist. And they identify as givers more, too. (At least within that community, it does not necessarily translate to other areas of their lives, at least not for a time.) The fourth principle is empathy motivates giving. Wayne Baker runs Reciprocity Rings where he takes executives from competing companies within an industry and has them ask for help from the group (not necessarily related to their business, it might be personal of some sort). Initially people think that this will not work, but people empathize with the need and someone usually is able to offer help. Then this snowballs more and more people offer and receive help. When Grant has done reciprocity rings with his students, the end result is that the people in the group identify themselves and the group as a unique, giving community.

If you think you are alone as a giver, Grant suggests looking not out at the “horizon” of publicly successful people (who can tend to be takers), but at the successful people around you. Usually you will find that the successful people at your company are givers.

I got interested in Give and Take from a Singaporean leader of a leadership summer camp for mainland Chinese college students I participated in one year. He said that this book changed his life. I can see why, particularly for cutthroat Singapore. Grant gives compelling stories backed by psychological studies on giving. He explains why givers are more successful than takers, and why it is a better strategy than matching. He gives well-researched strategies for being an “otherish” giver, the sort that succeeds and does not burn out. And he gives strategies and activities to transform your environment by inviting people to do giving. This is an easily readable but also research-based book that will definitely make you want to be a giver.