by Adam Grant
When Meyer’s two friends recommended him to Letterman, they called him “the funniest man in America.” This wasn’t a statement to be taken lightly—the two went on to become an Emmy-winning pair of comedy writers on shows like Seinfeld, The Wonder Years, and Monk. And if you look at what George Meyer has accomplished since he finished the Letterman movie script, you might be inclined to agree with them.
George Meyer is the mastermind of much of the humor on The Simpsons, the longest-running sitcom and animated program in America.
The Simpsons has won twenty-seven prime-time Emmy Awards, six of which went to Meyer, and changed the face of animated comedy. Although Meyer didn’t launch The Simpsons—it was created by Matt Groening and developed with James L. Brooks and Sam Simon—there is widespread consensus that Meyer was the most important force behind the show’s success. Meyer was hired to write for The Simpsons before it premiered in 1989, and he was a major contributor for sixteen seasons as a writer and executive producer. Meyer “has so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons could be viewed as mostly his,” writes Owen. According to humor writer Mike Sacks, “Meyer is largely considered among the writing staff to be its behind-the-scenes genius among geniuses,” the man “responsible for the best lines and jokes.” Jon Vitti, one of the original Simpsons writers who authored many of the early episodes and later served as a producer on The Office, elaborated that Meyer is “the one in the room who writes more of the show than anyone else—his fingerprints are on nearly every script. He exerts as much influence on the show as anyone can without being one of the creators.”
How does a man like George Meyer become so successful in collaborative work? Reciprocity styles offer a powerful lens for explaining why some people flourish in teams while others fail. In Multipliers, former Oracle executive Liz Wiseman distinguishes between geniuses and genius makers. Geniuses tend to be takers: to promote their own interests, they “drain intelligence, energy, and capability” from others. Genius makers tend to be givers: they use their “intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities” of other people, Wiseman writes, such that “lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved.” My goal in this chapter is to explore how these differences between givers and takers affect individual and group success.
Collaboration and Creative Character
When we consider what it takes to attain George Meyer’s level of comedic impact, there’s little question that creativity is a big part of the equation. Carolyn Omine, a longtime Simpsons writer and producer, says that Meyer “has a distinct way of looking at the world. It’s completely unique.” Executive producer and show-runner Mike Scully once commented that when he first joined The Simpsons, Meyer “just blew me away. I had done a lot of sitcom work before, but George’s stuff was so different and so original that for a while I wondered if I wasn’t in over my head.”
To unlock the mystery of how people become highly creative, back in 1958, a Berkeley psychologist named Donald MacKinnon launched a path-breaking study. He wanted to identify the unique characteristics of highly creative people in art, science, and business, so he studied a group of people whose work involves all three fields: architects. To start, MacKinnon and his colleagues asked five independent architecture experts to submit a list of the forty most creative architects in the United States. Although they never spoke to one another, the experts achieved remarkably high consensus. They could have nominated up to two hundred architects in total, but after accounting for overlap, their lists featured just eighty-six. More than half of those architects were nominated by more than one expert, more than a third by the majority of the experts, and 15 percent by all five experts.
From there, forty of the country’s most creative architects agreed to be dissected psychologically. MacKinnon’s team compared them with eighty-four other architects who were successful but not highly creative, matching the creative and “ordinary” architects on age and geographic location. All of the architects traveled to Berkeley, where they spent three full days opening up their minds to MacKinnon’s team, and to science. They filled out a battery of personality questionnaires, experienced stressful social situations, took difficult problem-solving tests, and answered exhaustive interview questions about their entire life histories. MacKinnon’s team pored over mountains of data, using pseudonyms for each architect so they would remain blind to who was highly creative and who was not.
One group of architects emerged as significantly more “responsible, sincere, reliable, dependable,” with more “good character” and “sympathetic concern for others” than the other. The karma principle suggests that it should be the creative architects, but it wasn’t. It was the ordinary architects. MacKinnon found that the creative architects stood out as substantially more “demanding, aggressive, and self-centered” than the comparison group. The creative architects had whopping egos and responded aggressively and defensively to criticism. In later studies, the same patterns emerged from comparisons of creative and less creative scientists: the creative scientists scored significantly higher in dominance, hostility, and psychopathic deviance. Highly creative scientists were rated by observers as creating and exploiting dependency in others. Even the highly creative scientists themselves agreed with statements like “I tend to slight the contribution of others and take undue credit for myself” and “I tend to be sarcastic and disparaging in describing the worth of other researchers.”
Takers have a knack for generating creative ideas and championing them in the face of opposition. Because they have supreme confidence in their own opinions, they feel free of the shackles of social approval that constrict the imaginations of many people. This is a distinctive signature of George Meyer’s comedy. In 2002, he wrote, directed, and starred in a small play called Up Your Giggy. In his monologues, he called God “a ridiculous superstition, invented by frightened cavemen” and referred to marriage as “a stagnant cauldron of fermented resentments, scared and judgmental conformity, exaggerated concern for the children . . . and the secret dredging-up of erotic images from past lovers in a desperate and heartbreaking attempt to make spousal sex even possible.”
The secret to creativity: be a taker?
Not so fast. Meyer may harbor a cynical sense of humor, deep-seated suspicion about time-honored traditions, and a few past indiscretions, but in a Hollywood universe dominated by takers, he has spent much of his career in giver style. It started early in life: growing up, he was an Eagle Scout and an altar boy. At Harvard, Meyer majored in biochemistry and was accepted to medical school, but decided not to attend. He was turned off by the hypercompetitive premed students he met in college, who would regularly “sabotage each other’s experiments—so lame.” After being elected president of the Lampoon, when peers attempted to depose him, Owen notes that “Meyer not only survived that coup but also, characteristically, became a close friend of his principal rival.” After graduating and failing at the dog track, Meyer worked in a cancer research lab and as a substitute teacher. When I asked Meyer what drew him to comedy, he said, “I love to make people laugh, entertain people, and try to make the world a little better.”
Meyer has used his comedic talent to promote social and environmental responsibility. In 1992, an early Simpsons episode that Meyer wrote, “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” was nominated for an Environmental Media Award, granted to the best episodic comedy on television with a pro-environmental message. During his tenure, The Simpsons won six of these awards. In 1995, The Simpsons won a Genesis Award from the Humane Society for raising public awareness of animal issues. Meyer is a vegetarian who practices yoga, and in 2005 he cowrote Earth to America, a TBS special that utilized comedy as a vehicle for raising awareness about global warming and related environmental issues. He has done extensive work for Conservation International, producing humorous PowerPoint lectures to promote biodiversity. In 2007, when scientists discovered a new species
of moss frogs in Sri Lanka, they named it after Meyer’s daughter, honoring his contributions to the Global Amphibian Assessment to protect frogs.
Even more impressive than Meyer’s work on behalf of the planet is how he works with other people. His big break came when he was working on the Letterman movie script in 1988. To provide some variety in his workday, he wrote and self-published a humor magazine called Army Man. “There were very few publications that were just trying to be funny,” Meyer told humorist Eric Spitznagel, “so I tried to make something that had no agenda other than to make you laugh.” The first issue of Army Man was only eight pages long. Meyer typed it himself, arranged it on his bed, and started making photocopies. Then he gave away his best comedy, sending copies to about two hundred friends for free.
Readers found Army Man hilarious and started passing it along to their friends. The magazine quickly attracted a cult following, and it made Rolling Stone magazine’s Hot List of the year’s best in entertainment. Soon, Meyer’s friends began sending him submissions to feature in future issues. By the second issue, there was enough demand for Meyer to circulate about a thousand copies. He shut it down after the third issue, in part because he couldn’t publish all of his friends’ submissions but couldn’t bear to turn them down.
The first issue of Army Man debuted when The Simpsons was getting off the ground, and it made its way into the hands of executive producer Sam Simon, who was just about to recruit a writing team. Simon hired Meyer and a few of the other contributors to Army Man, and they went on to make The Simpsons a hit together. In the writers’ room, George Meyer established himself as a giver. Tim Long, a Simpsons writer and five-time Emmy winner, told me that “George has the best reputation of anyone I know. He’s incredibly generous in giving and helping other people.” Similarly, Carolyn Omine marvels, “Everybody who knows George knows he is a truly good person. He has a code of honor, and he lives by this code, with a supernatural amount of integrity.”
George Meyer’s success highlights that givers can be every bit as creative as takers. By studying his habits in collaboration, we can gain a rich appreciation of how givers work in ways that contribute to their own success—and the success of those around them. But to develop a complete understanding of what givers do effectively in collaboration, it’s important to compare them with takers. The research on creative architects suggests that takers often have the confidence to generate original ideas that buck traditions and fight uphill battles to champion these ideas. But does this independence come at a price?
Flying Solo
In the twentieth century, perhaps no person was more emblematic of eminent creativity than Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1991, Wright was recognized as the greatest American architect of all time by the American Institute of Architects. He had an extraordinarily productive career, designing the famous Fallingwater house near Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum, and more than a thousand other structures—roughly half of which were built. In a career that spanned seven decades, he completed an average of more than 140 designs and 70 structures per decade.
Although Wright was prolific throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, beginning in 1924, he took a nine-year nosedive. As of 1925, “Wright’s career had dwindled to a few houses in Los Angeles,” write sociologist Roger Friedland and architect Harold Zellman. After studying Wright’s career, the psychologist Ed de St. Aubin concluded that the lowest Wright “ever sank architecturally occurred in the years between 1924 and 1933 when he completed only two projects.” Over those nine years, Wright was about thirty-five times less productive than usual. During one two-year period, he didn’t earn a single commission, and he was “floundering professionally,” notes architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. By 1932, “the world-famous Frank Lloyd Wright” was “all but unemployed,” wrote biographer Brendan Gill. “His last major executed commission had been a house for his cousin” in 1929, and “he was continuously in debt,” to the point of struggling “to find the wherewithal to buy groceries.” What caused America’s greatest architect to languish?
Wright was one of the architects invited to participate in MacKinnon’s study of creativity. Although he declined the invitation, the portrait of the creative architect that emerged from MacKinnon’s analysis was the spitting image of Wright. In his designs, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared to be a humanitarian. He introduced the concept of organic architecture, striving to foster harmony between people and the environments in which they lived. But in his interactions with other people, he operated like a taker. Experts believe that as an apprentice, Wright designed at least nine bootleg houses, violating the terms of his contract that prohibited independent work. To hide the illegal work, Wright reportedly persuaded one of his fellow draftsmen to sign off on several of the houses. At one point, Wright promised his son John a salary for working as an assistant on several projects. When John asked him to be paid, Wright sent him a bill itemizing the total amount of money that John had cost over the course of his life, from birth to the present.
When designing the famous Fallingwater house, Wright stalled for months. When the client, Edgar Kaufmann, finally called Wright to announce that he was driving 140 miles to see his progress, Wright claimed the house was finished. But when Kaufmann arrived, Wright had not even completed a drawing, let alone the house. In the span of a few hours, before Kaufmann’s eyes, Wright sketched out a detailed design. Kaufmann had commissioned a weekend cottage at one of his family’s favorite picnic spots, where they could see a waterfall. Wright had a radically different idea in mind: he drew the house on a rock on top of the waterfall, which would be out of sight from the house. He convinced Kaufmann to accept it, and eventually charged him $125,000 for it, more than triple the $35,000 specified in the contract. It’s unlikely that a giver would have ever been comfortable deviating so far from a client’s expectations, let alone convincing him to endorse it enthusiastically and charging extra for it. It was a taker’s mind-set, it seems, that gave Wright the gall to develop a truly original vision and sell it to a client.
But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911, he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building designs.”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house, which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice Edgar Tafel, who worked on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t tell him that.”
Wright’s story exposes the gap between our natural tendencies to attribute creative success to individuals and the collaborative reality that underpins much truly great work. This gap isn’t limited to strictly creative fields. Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize. For the past decade, several Harvard profess
ors have studied cardiac surgeons in hospitals and security analysts in investment banks. Both groups specialize in knowledge work: they need serious smarts to rewire patients’ hearts and organize complex information for stock recommendations. According to management guru Peter Drucker, these “knowledge workers, unlike manual workers in manufacturing, own the means of production: they carry that knowledge in their heads and can therefore take it with them.” But carrying knowledge isn’t actually so easy.
In one study, professors Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano wanted to know whether surgeons get better with practice. Since surgeons are in high demand, they perform procedures at multiple hospitals. Over a two-year period, Huckman and Pisano tracked 38,577 procedures performed by 203 cardiac surgeons at forty-three different hospitals. They focused on coronary artery bypass grafts, where surgeons open a patient’s chest and attach a vein from a leg or a section of chest artery to bypass a blockage in an artery to the heart. On average, 3 percent of patients died during these procedures.
When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. Overall, the surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the specific hospital where they practiced. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts. They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anesthesiologists, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it didn’t carry over to other hospitals. To reduce the risk of patient mortality, the surgeons needed relationships with specific surgical team members.