Give and Take

by Adam Grant

  There’s a second downside of reciprocity, and it’s one to which matchers are especially vulnerable. 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 think can help them. After all, if you don’t benefit from having your favors reciprocated, what’s the value of being a matcher?

  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. Both disadvantages ultimately arise out of a shortsightedness about networks, in that takers and matchers make hard-and-fast assumptions about just who will be able to provide the most benefit in exchange. At its core, the giver approach extends a broader reach, and in doing so enlarges the range of potential payoffs, even though those payoffs are not the motivating engine. “When you meet people,” says former Apple evangelist and Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki, regardless of who they are, “you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I help the other person?’” This may strike some as a way to overinvest in others, but as Adam Rifkin once learned to great effect, we can’t always predict who can help us.

  Waking the Sleeping Giants

  In 1993, a college student named Graham Spencer teamed up with five friends to build an Internet start-up. Spencer was a shy, introverted computer engineer with a receding hairline, huge glasses, and an obsession with comic books. Looking back, he says Superman taught him justice and virtue, the X-Men kindled concern for oppressed groups, and Spider-Man gave him hope: “even superheroes could have a rough time in school.”

  Spencer and his friends cofounded Excite, an early Web portal and search engine that quickly became one of the most popular sites on the Internet. In 1998, Excite was purchased for $6.7 billion, and Spencer was flying high as its largest shareholder and chief technology officer. In 1999, shortly after selling Excite, Spencer received an e-mail out of the blue from Adam Rifkin, who was asking for advice on a start-up. They had never met, but Spencer volunteered to sit down with Rifkin anyway. After they met, Spencer connected Rifkin with a venture capitalist who ended up funding his start-up. How did Rifkin get access to Spencer? And why did Spencer go out of his way to help Rifkin?

  Early in 1994, five years before seeking Spencer’s help, Rifkin became enamored with an emerging band. He wanted to help the band gain popularity, so he put his computer prowess into action and created a fan website, hosted on the Caltech server. “It was an authentic expression of being a fan of music. I loved the music.” The page took off: hundreds of thousands of people found it as the band skyrocketed from anonymity into stardom.

  The band was called Green Day.

  Rifkin’s fan site was so popular in the burgeoning days of the commercial Internet that in 1995, Green Day’s managers contacted him to ask if they could take it over and make it the band’s official page. “I said, ‘Great, it’s all yours’,” Rifkin recalls. “I just gave it to them.” The previous summer, in 1994, millions of people had visited Rifkin’s site. One of the visitors, a serious punk rock fan, felt that Green Day was really pop music. He had e-mailed Rifkin to educate him about “real” punk rock.

  The fan was none other than Graham Spencer. Spencer suggested that when people searched for punk rock on the Internet, they should find more than Green Day. When Rifkin read the e-mail, he imagined Spencer as a stereotypical punk rock fan with a green Mohawk. Rifkin had no idea that Spencer would ever be able to help him—it would only come out much later that Spencer had just started Excite. A taker or matcher might have ignored the e-mail from Spencer. But as a giver, Rifkin’s natural inclination was to help Spencer spread the word about punk rock and help struggling bands build up a fan base. So Rifkin set up a separate page on the Green Day fan site with links to the punk rock bands that Spencer suggested.

  There’s an elegance to Adam Rifkin’s experience with Graham Spencer, a satisfying sense of good deeds rewarded. But if we take a closer look, we find an example of just what makes giver networks so powerful, and it has as much to do with the five years that passed after Rifkin’s generosity as with the generosity itself. Rifkin’s experiences foreshadow how givers have the advantage of accessing the full breadth of their networks.

  One of Rifkin’s maxims is “I believe in the strength of weak ties.” It’s in homage to a classic study by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Strong ties are our close friends and colleagues, the people we really trust. Weak ties are our acquaintances, the people we know casually. Testing the common assumption that we get the most help from our strong ties, Granovetter surveyed people in professional, technical, and managerial professions who had recently changed jobs. Nearly 17 percent heard about the job from a strong tie. Their friends and trusted colleagues gave them plenty of leads.

  But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.

  Here’s the wrinkle: it’s tough to ask weak ties for help. Although they’re the faster route to new leads, we don’t always feel comfortable reaching out to them. The lack of mutual trust between acquaintances creates a psychological barrier. But givers like Adam Rifkin have discovered a loophole. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds: the trust of strong ties coupled with the novel information of weak ties.

  The key is reconnecting, and it’s a major reason why givers succeed in the long run.

  After Rifkin created the punk rock links on the Green Day site for Spencer in 1994, Excite took off, and Rifkin went back to graduate school. They lost touch for five years. When Rifkin was moving to Silicon Valley, he dug up the old e-mail chain and drafted a note to Spencer. “You may not remember me from five years ago; I’m the guy who made the change to the Green Day website,” Rifkin wrote. “I’m starting a company and moving to Silicon Valley, and I don’t know a lot of people. Would you be willing to meet with me and offer advice?”

  Rifkin wasn’t being a matcher. When he originally helped Spencer, he did it with no strings attached, never intending to call in a favor. But five years later, when he needed help, he reached out with a genuine request. Spencer was glad to help, and they met up for coffee. “I still pictured him as this huge guy with a Mohawk,” Rifkin says. “When I met him in person, he hardly said any words at all. He was even more introverted than I am.” By the second meeting, Spencer was introducing Rifkin to a venture capitalist. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to reengaging with him over e-mail in 1999, which led to my company getting founded in 2000,” Rifkin recalls. “Givers get lucky.”

  Yet there’s reason to believe that part of what Rifkin calls luck is in fact a predictable, patterned response that most people have to givers. Thirty years ago, the sociologist Fred Goldner wrote about what it means to experience the opposite of paranoia: pronoia. According to the distinguished psychologist Brian Little, pronoia is “the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being, or saying nice things about you behind your back.”

  If you’re a giver, this belief may be a reality, not a delusion. What if other people are actually plotting th
e success of givers like Adam Rifkin?

  In 2005, when Rifkin was starting Renkoo with Joyce Park, they didn’t have any office space, so they were working out of Rifkin’s kitchen. A colleague went out of his way to introduce Rifkin to Reid Hoffman, who had recently founded LinkedIn, which had fewer than fifty employees at the time. Hoffman met up with Rifkin and Park on a Sunday and offered them free desks at LinkedIn, putting Rifkin in the heart of Silicon Valley. “In the summer of 2005, one of the companies right next to us was YouTube, and we got to meet them in their infancy before they really took off,” Rifkin says.

  Rifkin’s experience sheds new light on the old saying that what goes around comes around. These karmic moments can often be traced to the fact that matchers are on a mission to make them happen. Just as matchers will sacrifice their own interests to punish takers who act selfishly toward others, they’ll go out of their way to reward givers who act generously toward others. When Adam Rifkin helped people in his network, the matchers felt it was only fair to plot his well-being. True to form, he used his newfound access at LinkedIn to plot the well-being of other people in his network, referring engineers for jobs at LinkedIn.

  On a Wednesday evening in May, I got to see the panda in his natural habitat. At a bar for a 106 Miles meeting in Redwood City, Rifkin walked in with a huge grin, wearing a San Francisco Giants jersey. He was immediately swarmed by a group of tech entrepreneurs—some smooth, others endearingly awkward. As dozens of entrepreneurs piled into the bar, Rifkin was able to tell me each of their stories, which was no small feat for someone who receives more than eight hundred e-mails in a typical day.

  His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable patience. Early in the evening, Rifkin asked one budding entrepreneur how his company was doing. The entrepreneur talked for fourteen minutes without interruption. Although the monologue might have exhausted even the most curious of tech geeks, Rifkin never lost interest. “Where do you need help?” he asked, and the entrepreneur mentioned a need for a programmer specializing in an obscure computer language. Rifkin started scrolling through his mental Rolodex and recommended candidates to contact. Later in the evening, one of those candidates arrived in person, and Rifkin made the introduction. As the crowd grew, Rifkin still took the time to have a personal conversation with everyone there. When new members approached him, he typically spent fifteen or twenty minutes getting to know them, asking what motivated them and how he could help them. Many of those people were complete strangers, but just as he had helped Graham Spencer eighteen years earlier without thinking twice, he took it upon himself to find them jobs, connect them to potential cofounders, and offer advice for solving problems in their companies. Each time he gave, he created a new connection. But is it really possible to keep up with all of these contacts?

  Dormant Ties

  Because he maintains such a large network, Adam Rifkin has a growing number of dormant ties—people he used to see often or know well, but with whom he has since fallen out of contact. According to management professors Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter, and Keith Murnighan, “adults accumulate thousands of relationships over their lifetimes, but, prior to the Internet, they actively maintained no more than 100 or 200 at any given time.” For the past few years, these professors have been asking executives to do something that they dread: reactivate their dormant ties. When one executive learned of the assignment, “I groaned. If there are dormant contacts, they are dormant for a reason, right? Why would I want to contact them?”

  But the evidence tells a different story. In one study, Levin and colleagues asked more than two hundred executives to reactivate ties that had been dormant for a minimum of three years. Each executive reached out to two former colleagues and sought advice on an ongoing work project. After receiving the advice, they rated its value: to what extent did it help them solve problems and gain useful referrals? They also rated the advice that they received from two current contacts on the same project. Surprisingly, the executives rated the advice from the dormant ties as contributing more value than the advice from the current ties. Why?

  The dormant ties provided more novel information than the current contacts. Over the past few years, while they were out of touch, they had been exposed to new ideas and perspectives. The current contacts were more likely to share the knowledge base and viewpoint that the executives already possessed. One executive commented that “before contacting them I thought that they would not have too much to provide beyond what I had already thought, but I was proved wrong. I was very surprised by the fresh ideas.”

  Dormant ties offer the access to novel information that weak ties afford, but without the discomfort. As Levin and colleagues explain, “reconnecting a dormant relationship is not like starting a relationship from scratch. When people reconnect, they still have feelings of trust.” An executive divulged that “I feel comfortable . . . I didn’t need to guess what his intentions were . . . there was mutual trust that we built years ago that made our conversation today smoother.” Reactivating a dormant tie actually required a shorter conversation, since there was already some common ground. The executives didn’t need to invest in building a relationship from the start with their dormant ties, as they would with weak ties.

  Levin and colleagues asked another group of more than one hundred executives to identify ten dormant ties and rank them in order of the likely value they would provide. The executives then reactivated all ten dormant ties and rated the value of the conversations. All ten dormant ties provided high value, and there were no differences by rank: the executives got just as much value from their tenth choice as from their first choice. When we need new information, we may run out of weak ties quickly, but we have a large pool of dormant ties that prove to be helpful. And the older we get, the more dormant ties we have, and the more valuable they become. Levin and colleagues found that people in their forties and fifties received more value from reactivating dormant ties than people in their thirties, who in turn benefited more than people in their twenties. The executive who groaned about reconnecting admitted that it “has been eye-opening for me . . . it has shown me how much potential I have in my Rolodex.”

  Dormant ties are the neglected value in our networks, and givers have a distinctive edge over takers and matchers in unlocking this value. For takers, reactivating dormant ties is a challenge. If the dormant ties are fellow takers, they’ll be suspicious and self-protective, withholding novel information. If the dormant ties are matchers, they may be motivated to punish takers, as we saw in the ultimatum game. If the dormant ties are smart givers, as you’ll see later in this book, they won’t be so willing to help takers. And of course, if a taker’s self-serving actions were what caused a tie to become dormant in the first place, it may be impossible to revive the relationship at all.

  Matchers have a much easier time reconnecting, but they’re often uncomfortable reaching out for help because of their fidelity to the norm of reciprocity. When they ask for a favor, they feel that they’ll owe one back. If they’re already indebted to the dormant tie and haven’t yet evened the score, it’s doubly difficult to ask. And for many matchers, dormant ties haven’t built up a deep reservoir of trust, since they’ve been more like transactional exchanges than meaningful relationships.

  According to networking experts, reconnecting is a totally different experience for givers, especially in a wired world. Givers have a track record of generously sharing their knowledge, teaching us their skills, and helping us find jobs without worrying about what’s in it for them, so we’re glad to help them when they get back in touch with us. Today, Adam Rifkin spends less time networking with new people than he did earlier in his career, focusing instead on a growing number of dormant ties. “Now my time is spent going back to people who I haven’t talked to in a while.” When he reactivates one of his many dormant ties, the contact is usually thrilled to hear from him. His generosity and kindness have earned
their trust. They’re grateful for his help, and they know it didn’t come with strings attached; he’s always willing to share his knowledge, offer advice, or make an introduction. In 2006, Rifkin was looking for a dynamite speaker for a 106 Miles meeting. He reconnected with Evan Williams, and although Williams had become famous and was extremely busy with the launch of Twitter, he agreed. “Five years later, when we asked him to speak to the group, he never forgot,” Rifkin says.

  The type of goodwill that givers like Rifkin build is the subject of fascinating research. Traditionally, social network researchers map information exchange: the flows of knowledge from person to person. But when Wayne Baker collaborated with University of Virginia professor Rob Cross and IBM’s Andrew Parker, he realized that it was also possible to track the flows of energy through networks. In a range of organizations, employees rated their interactions with one another on a scale from strongly de-energizing to strongly energizing. The researchers created an energy network map, which looked like a model of a galaxy.

  The takers were black holes. They sucked the energy from those around them. The givers were suns: they injected light around the organization. Givers created opportunities for their colleagues to contribute, rather than imposing their ideas and hogging credit for achievements. When they disagreed with suggestions, givers showed respect for the people who spoke up, rather than belittling them.

  If you mapped energy in Adam Rifkin’s network, you’d find that he looks like the sun in many different solar systems. Several years ago at a holiday party, Rifkin met a struggling entrepreneur named Raymond Rouf. They started chatting, and Rifkin gave him some feedback. Six months later, Rouf was working on a new start-up and reached out to Rifkin for advice. Rifkin replied the same day and set up a breakfast for the next morning, where he spent two hours giving more feedback to Rouf. A few months later, they crossed paths again. Rouf had gone two years without an income, and the plumbing in his house wasn’t working, so he bought a gym membership just to shower there. He ran into Rifkin, who asked how the start-up was going and offered some invaluable insights about how to reposition his company. Rifkin then proceeded to introduce Rouf to a venture capitalist, who ended up funding his company and becoming a board member. “The two of them would have meetings about me, to discuss how they could help me,” Rouf says. Rouf’s company, GraphScience, has become one of the top Facebook analytics companies in the world—and he says it never would have happened without Rifkin’s help.