by Adam Grant
Rifkin has even managed to light up projects for a Hollywood writer/director. As you’ll see in chapter 8, they met because Rifkin shared his contact information openly on the Internet. In a casual conversation, the Hollywood director mentioned that he had just finished production on a Showtime series and asked Rifkin for help. “Although he is quite successful in his chosen field, I didn’t put too much credence in his skill as a Hollywood publicist,” says the director. “Boy was I wrong!” Within twenty-four hours, Rifkin set up meetings and private screenings of the show with top-ranking executives at Twitter and YouTube. The Hollywood contact explains:
It’s important to emphasize: Adam had absolutely no stake in my show’s success. Sink or swim, he wouldn’t benefit or suffer either way. But true to his genuine joy of giving, he went out of his way to introduce us to countless media opportunities. When the dust had settled, he was singlehandedly responsible for positive and glowing articles in countless national media outlets as well as incredible social media publicity. In the end, his generosity was more far reaching and far more effective than our show’s highly paid Hollywood publicist. As a result, the show enjoyed the highest ratings ever received in its time slot in Showtime’s history! Showtime, so impressed with our modest show’s numbers, has already given the green light to another series. His generosity is responsible for the show being a hit and Showtime saying yes to my current series.
For someone who gives off these vibes and inspires such goodwill, reconnecting is an energizing experience. Think back to the 265 people for whom Rifkin has written LinkedIn recommendations, or the hundreds of entrepreneurs he helps in 106 Miles. It’s not a stretch to imagine that every one of them will be enthusiastic about reconnecting with Rifkin, and helping him out, if they happen to lose touch.
But Adam Rifkin isn’t after their help—at least not for himself. Rifkin’s real aim is to change our fundamental ideas about how we build our networks and who should benefit from them. He believes that we should see networks as a vehicle for creating value for everyone, not just claiming it for ourselves. And he is convinced that this giver approach to networking can uproot the traditional norm of reciprocity in a manner that’s highly productive for all involved.
The Five-Minute Favor
In 2012, a LinkedIn recruiter named Stephanie was asked to list the three people who had the most influence on her career. Adam Rifkin was shocked to learn that he appeared on her list, because they had met only once, months earlier. Stephanie was searching for a job and met Rifkin through a friend of a friend. He gave her advice, primarily by text message, and helped her find job leads. She e-mailed him to express her gratitude and offered to reciprocate: “I know we only met in person once and we talk only occasionally, but you have helped me more than you know . . . I really would like to do something to help give back to you.”
But Stephanie wasn’t just looking to help Adam Rifkin. Instead, she volunteered to attend a 106 Miles meeting of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs so she could help Rifkin help them. At the meeting, Stephanie would give entrepreneurs feedback on their ideas, offer to test their product prototypes, and facilitate connections with potential collaborators and investors. The same thing has happened with many other people whom Rifkin helps. Raymond Rouf often drops by 106 Miles meetings to assist other entrepreneurs. So does an engineer named Bob, who met Rifkin in a bar in 2009. They struck up a conversation, and Rifkin learned that Bob was out of work, so he made some introductions that landed Bob a position. The company went out of business, and Rifkin made more connections that resulted in a job for Bob at a start-up, which was acquired six months later by Google. Today, Bob is a successful Google engineer, and he’s paying the help he received forward across the 106 Miles network.
This is a new spin on reciprocity. In traditional old-school reciprocity, people operated like matchers, trading value back and forth with one another. We helped the people who helped us, and we gave to the people from whom we wanted something in return. But today, givers like Adam Rifkin are able to spark a more powerful form of reciprocity. Instead of trading value, Rifkin aims to add value. His giving is governed by a simple rule: the five-minute favor. “You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.”
Rifkin doesn’t think about what any of the people he helps will contribute back to him. Whereas takers accumulate large networks to look important and gain access to powerful people, and matchers do it to get favors, Rifkin does it to create more opportunities for giving. In the words of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.” When people feel grateful for Rifkin’s help, like Stephanie, they’re more likely to pay it forward. “I have always been a very genuine and kind-hearted person,” Stephanie says, “but I had tried to hide it and be more competitive so that I could get ahead. The important lesson I learned from Adam is that you can be a genuinely kind-hearted person and still get ahead in the world.” Every time Rifkin generously shares his expertise or connections, he’s investing in encouraging the people in his network to act like givers. When Rifkin does ask people for help, he’s usually asking for assistance in helping someone else. This increases the odds that the people in his vast network will seek to add value rather than trade value, opening the door for him and others to gain benefits from people they’ve never helped—or even met. By creating a norm of adding value, Rifkin transforms giving from a zero-sum loss to a win-win gain.
When takers build networks, they try to claim as much value as possible for themselves from a fixed pie. When givers like Rifkin build networks, they expand the pie so that everyone can get a larger slice. Nick Sullivan, an entrepreneur who has benefited from Rifkin’s help, says that “Adam has the same effect on all of us: getting us to help people.” Rouf elaborates: “Adam always wants to make sure that whoever he’s giving to is also giving to somebody else. If people benefit from his advice, he makes sure they help other people he gives advice to—it’s creating a network, and making sure that everybody in his network is helping each other, paying it forward.”
Cutting-edge research shows how Rifkin motivates other people to give. Giving, especially when it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within a group. It turns out that giving can be contagious. In one study, contagion experts James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis found that giving spreads rapidly and widely across social networks. When one person made the choice to contribute to a group at a personal cost over a series of rounds, other group members were more likely to contribute in future rounds, even when interacting with people who weren’t present for the original act. “This influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person),” Fowler and Christakis find, such that “each additional contribution a subject makes . . . in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence.”
When people walk into a new situation, they look to others for clues about appropriate behavior. When giving starts to occur, it becomes the norm, and people carry it forward in interactions with other people. To illustrate, imagine that you’re assigned to a group of four. The other three people are strangers, and you’ll each make anonymous decisions, with no opportunity to communicate, during six rounds. In each round, each of you will receive $3 and decide whether to take it for yourselves or give it to the group. If you take it, you get the full $3. If you give it to the group, every group member gets $2, including you. At the end of each round, you’ll find out what everyone decided. The group is better off if everyone gives—each member would end up receiving $8 per round, for a maximum total over six rounds of $48. But if you give and no one else does, you only get $12. This creates an incent
ive to take, which will guarantee you $18.
Since you can’t communicate with one another, giving is a risky strategy. But in the actual study, 15 percent of the participants were consistent givers: they contributed to the group in all six rounds, making a personal sacrifice for the benefit of the group. And it wasn’t as costly as you’d expect. Surprisingly, the consistent givers still ended up doing well: they walked away with an average of 26 percent more money than participants from groups without a single consistent giver. How could they give more and get more?
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.
3
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.