Although 2013 is still young, I predict that Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success
The premise of the book is quite simple: the world comprises three types of people: givers, takers and matchers. Which type tends to be most successful? Although we’ve all been raised on the homily that it’s better to give than to receive, the bad news is that the left side of most bell curves is populated by givers, those who contribute more to others than they expect in return. Quite simply, they do less for themselves, people take advantage of them, and they are prone to burnout.
But the real surprise is that the right side of bell curves is also a givers’ neighborhood. Combining extensive research with inspiring examples, Grant shows us how and why successful givers do well for themselves at the same time that they contribute so much to others. Successful givers approach four principal aspects of relationships differently. The four aspects are networking, collaborating, developing talent and communicating.
Successful givers are excellent networkers, but so are a lot of takers and matchers. The difference is that successful givers proactively do things without expectation of return, creating goodwill and possibly setting an example that may be contagious. One of the excellent tips in this chapter is the suggestion to revive dormant connections. The benefit is that when most people tap into their network for help, their strong ties are trusting and disposed to help, but their weak ties have more diverse information. People you haven’t talked to in a long time combine the assets of strong ties and weak ties.
Givers are also excellent collaborators, quick to help others in a team environment and without spending too much time worrying about who gets credit. They tend to demonstrate what the National Outdoor Leadership School calls expedition behavior, putting the needs of the mission and the team ahead of your own. In the long run, this behavior increases their prestige and the willingness of others to help them when they need it.
Givers are also excellent at spotting talent, because they’re not worried about creating rivals who may outshine them. Also, because they tend to assume competence and talent on the part of others, they may be generating self-fulfilling prophecies. I found this chapter to be rather long on anecdote and thin on evidence, but the next chapter made up for it.
For me the meatiest chapter covered the successful practices that givers follow in communicating with others, in presenting, selling, and negotiating. Successful givers ask more meaningful questions and have an effective mix of confidence and humility in their advocacy. They also tend to be good at perspective-taking, which is the cognitive equivalent of empathy: instead of feeling what the other person is feeling, they are adept at thinking what they’re thinking. In studies, people with high empathy do worse in creating value, because they are more apt to give the other person what they want. Those high in perspective taking are better at coming up with creative ideas to give both sides more of what they want.
The second section of the book is for those who are too giving, and tend to fall at the bottom of the success distribution because they get taken advantage of and exhaust their energies serving others rather than themselves. The key insight is that self-interest and other-interest are not opposite points on a single line; they are separate axes on a graph. Those who give too much have a high score for other-interest, and a low score for self-interest. Successful givers are at the top right of the graph, combining a high other-focus with high self-interest. As a result, they are in better control of their giving, seeing it as a positive choice rather than an obligation, and being more proactive in allocating their giving time and energy.
If you get inspired by Grant’s book, what you’ll really want to know is how to become a more successful giver. The Catch-22 is that giving has to be sincere if it’s to work, and if you try to make it strategic it’s not sincere. I do think, however, that if you begin changing your behavior for strategic purposes, and start doing more for others, two positive things may happen. First, regardless of the motive, you’re contributing to the sum total of benefit and happiness. Even more important is that your attitude may begin to catch up with your actions. The mind does not like cognitive dissonance, so if we’re acting in a giving manner we will begin to see ourselves more as givers, leading to a virtuous circle. The book finishes with ten suggestions for becoming more of a giver—I’ll keep you posted on how it works.
The one weakness in the book is that in some of the chapters, as mentioned above, there was less evidence than it seemed on first reading. You get pulled in to the inspiring stories, but on closer reading you don’t find enough evidence to be able to make up your mind whether those examples are the rule or the exception.
Despite this, the message in Grant’s book is so powerful that I give it five stars. But it’s not a gift—it’s truly earned. The book itself is a gift to anyone who reads it, and to countless others who may be on the receiving end of their stepped-up giving.
I’ve just finished reading Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
But I decided not to do that. Instead, I am going to let you make the decision totally on your own, using some of the techniques outlined in the book.
The Heaths tell us that bad decisions are all too common in business and personal decision making. 40% of senior level hires by companies don’t work out within 18 months, 83% of mergers don’t create value for shareholders, and personally we all make bad investment and relationship choices all the time.
While incomplete information is sometimes to blame, the process used for making the decision is about six times more important. To put it bluntly, our processes for deciding are usually wrong, and they cite four main villains: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term decision making, and overconfidence. Our brains are simply not optimally wired for making complex decisions. We can’t eliminate our biases, but we can plan for them and try to counteract them.
To counteract these villains, there are four steps we should apply that encompass a number of specific tactics to improve our outcomes. The steps are described in the acronym WRAP:
- Widen your options
- Reality-test your assumptions
- Attain distance before deciding
- Prepare to Be Wrong
Let’s apply some of their suggestions to the momentous decision: should you buy the book?
Widen your options. First, the question asked immediately above is the wrong one. Too often we turn decisions into either/or choices, which automatically shuts down the spotlight of our attention and closes out other options. The real choice is: how should I invest $14.97 and the time it will take to read the book? You could buy other books that might be more useful and/or more fun to read, or you could spend the money on a twelve-pack of Heineken and save the reading time. (Although I don’t recommend this technique just before making an important decision.) There’s no guarantee that any of the other choices will be better, but one study showed that “whether or not” decisions failed 52% of the time, compared to 32% for those where two or more alternatives were considered.
Reality-test your assumptions. When you consider whether to read a book, you might read some of the reviews on Amazon. If you’re leaning toward purchasing this book, you will note that there are 50 reviews, averaging 4-1/2 stars. There is only one 1-star review. Check it out, at least for a disconfirming opinion. I don’t agree with the reviewer (in fact, I note that he did not even finish the book), but some of his criticisms contain some truth.[1]
Another technique is to zoom out and then zoom in. Zoom out means to consider the base rate. I’m assuming if you’re considering a book on improving decision making that you hope it will improve your life in some way. In this case, I’m guessing the base rate (the percentage of people who read a book and actually make positive changes as a result) is probably quite low. But then, you zoom in and consider what factors might make you more successful than the base rate. The fact that you’re reading this suggests that you’re a person who is seriously interested in personal growth and self-improvement, so your chances of getting practical benefit from the book are probably quite good.
Attain Distance before Deciding. This suggestion goes against my own self-interest, because if you click on the link above to buy the book, I will earn about 28 cents. But, you really should not decide immediately. Put some time between the stimulus and the response and you can take the short-term emotion out of it. Another great technique is to consider whether you would recommend that your best friend buy this book if she were considering making a life-changing decision. Somehow we can think more objectively about others’ choices than about our own.
Prepare to Be Wrong. Despite following the first three steps, you can never guarantee that your decision will be the right one, so one technique you can use is taken from the world of investing. It’s called “bookending”. Rather than trying to predict what a stock’s price will be in the future, “bookend” a range from reasonable worst case to reasonable best case. Then, gauge where on that spectrum the current price lies. Closer to the left means high upside and closer to the right means high downside. For this decision, I can’t see a reasonable scenario where applying these techniques will worsen the quality of your decisions, so the downside is that you spend $15, and either don’t like or don’t apply it. The upside is that you keep your company from making a multi-billion-dollar mistake and become a hero.
Of course, some of your life’s decisions are much more important than the trivial example I’ve cited here, and that’s when a sound process for making decisions can make a real difference. There’s a lot I’ve left out, but hopefully you have enough of a flavor of the techniques in the book to make the right decision. Of course, the Catch-22 is that if you’re good at making decisions, you don’t need this book!
It’s the people in the middle who make things happen.
Most books on military history focus either on the super-sized personalities and dazzling strategic vision of the generals at the top, or on the dramatic and courageous exploits of the grunts on the ground, sea or air. My father was one of the warfighters, so I have immense respect for everything they experienced and achieved.
Yet I’m glad that Paul Kennedy has written a book that focuses on the achievements of the middle managers, the nameless scientists, engineers, logisticians and trainers who worked tirelessly to solve the problems and provide the tools needed for victory. In hindsight, the outcome of the war may seem inevitable, but to those in the thick of it, it was a very close-run thing.
In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, along with their top generals and military advisers, met in Casablanca to plot their grand strategy to defeat the Axis powers. At the time, their situation was perhaps not as bleak as it had been just a few months prior—the allies had averted disaster and were no longer in imminent danger of losing the war—but they were still a long way from winning it. At the summit, the strategists agreed on a clear recipe for winning the war. It was actually pretty simple:
- First, they had to stop the German U-boats from sinking ships faster that they could build them, so they could feed England and build up the forces necessary to invade Europe.
- Second, they had to destroy the vaunted German air force so that they could weaken German industry and control the air to make an invasion possible.
- They also had to keep from losing the war in the meantime, by figuring out how to defeat the German blitzkrieg tactics, a task that every other country in Europe had previously found impossible to achieve.
- Finally, they had to get a vast army ashore against a well-defended and so-far invincible army.
- Oh, and by the way, they simultaneously had to figure out how to beat the Japanese across thousands of miles of empty ocean dotted with impregnable fortresses.
The strategy was a masterpiece, and in the end it turned out to be exactly how the war was won. The only problem is that no one knew how to do any of these simple tasks. It’s like the recipe for rabbit soup: First, catch one rabbit. (Except that this rabbit bites back, and is as well-armed as you are.)
The goals were like interlocking pieces of a puzzle—failure at one meant likely failure of the others. At the time those five goals were set, no one knew exactly how or if any of them could be accomplished. The strategic genius of the leaders depended on whether the middle managers could figure out the approaches and get things done. These were the organizers, scientists, engineers, and trainers that solved the problems, made things work, invented the necessary tools.
In the book, the engineers of victory included the operations analysts who figured out the proper distribution and depth settings for depth charges; the trainers who turned out crews (as many as 10 in the B-17) to man the tens of thousands of aircraft produced yearly; the logisticians who fed, armed, and clothed millions of troops spread literally around the world; the engineers who designed, built and transported mobile pontoon bridges to span the wide Russian rivers; the organizers who coordinated the movements of an incredible 2,700 vessels, 130,000 men and 12,000 aircraft on D-Day—without a single computer.
Kennedy defines the term engineers broadly as any problem solver, so the book is not just about technology. In fact, individual technological breakthroughs are not as effective unless they are part of a system. A great example of this is the P-51 Mustang fighter, which was a mediocre performer until an RAF test pilot got the idea to put in a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into it. Then, the various people involved had to beat the Not Invented Here attitude of the Army Air Force to push through the idea. The marriage of the Mustang’s superb aerodynamics and the Merlin engines—plus auxiliary gas tanks—created a plane that could accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and outfly anything it came up against on the way, and helped solve the second problem.
What are the lessons for business today?
Rapid learning. In war, learning is not a luxury—it’s the key to survival. The Allies won because the people in the middle provided feedback loops that connected all levels and ensured that even defeats such as the failed raid on Dieppe in 1942 provided benefits in the form of valuable lessons. By contrast, the Japanese had superb ships and aircraft at the beginning of the war, but made little or no improvements to them for the rest of the war.
Providing wide latitude to the people in the middle. The Allies found out how to get the right people in the proper positions and then get out of their way. As Churchill said in a memo to his generals: “We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their career.”
Complete systems approach. The Germans showed how the mere possession of wonder weapons such as the V-2 and jet fighters were not enough by themselves. They needed to fit within a complete and balanced system that could deliver the goods, withstand shocks, adapt, and grow.
We glorify our business leaders, pay them insane amounts of money, and eagerly snap up their biographies after they retire or die. Maybe we need to read more books about the middle level managers who make their success possible. Engineers of Victory
I first bought The Relationship Edge: The Key to Strategic Influence and Selling Success
Intellectually, I guess I’ve wanted it to be true. After all, it seems to me that consultative selling is a meritocracy while relationship selling is a popularity contest. You truly have to know your stuff to make it to the top of CS, but it seems that any natural-born schmoozer and back-slapper can succeed at RS. Those of us on the introverted end of the scale tend to take offense at that.
On the other hand, why not work on being good and popular? When I look objectively at my own sales success, more opportunities have come my way from established relationships and referrals than from cold-calling. It’s much easier to be consultative when people are ready and willing to engage in a conversation, and relationships open the necessary doors.
Acuff’s book actually provides a bridge or middle ground between the two camps. On the one hand, he says that relationships are everything in business. His main premise is that the quality and the richness of our relationships determines in many ways the quality and richness of our lives. But then he spans the divide by adding that creating valuable business relationships is not about making friends, although often lasting friendships will result. It’s not just about making connections either. We all have hundreds of connections that will never turn into valuable business relationships.
What is a valuable business relationship? He begins by describing six levels of relationship, which he calls the Relationship Pyramid. At level 1, they don’t know who you are, and at level 6, you have a valuable business relationship, which he defines as those with AIR: Access, Impact and Results.
Access: will they take your calls and respond promptly to your emails?
Impact: You have an opportunity to influence their actions
Results: They do things proactively to help you succeed.
How do valuable business relationships help you sell? As Acuff says, when trust and rapport are strong, selling pressure will always seem weak; when trust and rapport are weak, any selling pressure will seem too strong.
All of us have a number of Level 6 relationships which have developed naturally in our work and personal lives. Acuff shows us how to implement a mindset and process to substantially increase our natural “hit rate” and grow the number of Level 6 relationships.
Mindset: You have to think that relationships are important, and that you have something of value to add to others. The paradox of building relationships is that you have to be genuinely interested in others as people—not as contacts or connections—and later the benefits will come. The best advice in the book is to envision that everyone you talk to has the following words tattooed on their forehead: “Make me feel important.”
Process: Mindset is useless without a process to develop relationships and to turn those relationships into measurable results. The process is pretty simple. First you list your most important relationships, assess where each one is on the pyramid, and then create a plan to move each relationship to higher levels. You do this by increasing your touches, learning more about them as people, taking actions that will make their lives better in some ways, etc.
To learn more about people, the book suggests a list of 20 questions. I don’t agree with all of them, and I won’t remember them all anyway, so the best thing to remember is FORM: Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Motivation. Of course, the danger with lists like this is that some people will become determined to get the answers from all their contacts and will go about it in a formulaic and self-defeating way. Acuff shares ways to ask the questions properly and weave them naturally into the conversation.
My own take after reading Acuff’s process is a bit different. The first thing I’ve done is turn the pyramid upside down, because it’s really a funnel. Just like a sales funnel, suspects enter at the top and closed deals emerge from the bottom, once they have gone through a codified and systematic selling/buying process. This way, you can set goals for new contacts to put in the funnel, have measurable events that will indicate objectively what the quality of a relationship is, and have goals for numbers of level 6 relationships created. At the moment, I am working through what the gates or milestones are at each level, and what are the best tactics for moving a relationship through the funnel.
The one weakness in the book is that it is a bit thin on some of this practical advice. For example, Acuff says you need goals, but his chapter on goal setting is basically the ABCs of SMART goals, with very little practical advice on what some specific goals should be, and what tactics are best at each stage. I would have loved to see a chapter entitled: “50 ways to move people up the pyramid.”
That said, everyone is different, and maybe it’s best that the reader is left to figure out specifics on his own. The important thing is to have the right mindset, make a plan to work through the process, and stick to it. The Relationship Edge can help you with the big picture, and you can fill in the colors that work best for you.
