Book review: Give and Take, by Adam Grant

Originally published on Good Reads, here

A recent recommendation by a smart colleague, I am not sure how I missed this book when it first came out, as much of it resonates incredibly well with my view about reciprocity in the business world and the idea of “paying it forward”.

Adam Grant provide a wealth of examples in this book of different types of reciprocity style, “givers”, “takers” and “matchers” and shows — for many from a traditional business school background the counterintuitive — perspective that givers are more prevalent in highly successful organisations than would be expected.

According to Grant’s research it seems to hold true across industry, but his examples from the creative and knowledge-based economy ring particularly true — I especially enjoyed the early examples in the book from the Simpson’s creative team and how giving resulted in a virtuous circle and even greater creativity, but his research from large scale enterprises and the role that senior leadership’s reciprocity style has in setting the company ethic is inspirational.

In today’s world, with the reemergence of “purpose-led” organisations that think beyond simple shareholder value, this book holds some nuanced perspectives that outline just what this can and should mean in practice and goes beyond the hype (and the surface level sales job that many organisations are going through today in “refinding” their purpose);

Crucially, Grant shows how there are some particular behaviours of “high performance givers” that he describes as “Otherish”, who create mutual value in their generosity — vitally — without sacrificing their own progress and position. Definitively harder than and undoubtedly requiring executive leadership modelling of “otherish” behaviours to embed this culture of generosity, Grant goes on to provide an excellent set of immediate actions that can be taken at an individual and company level to create this kind of generative organisation.

The book is not without its problems in my view; in particular, it focuses very much on giving in a pretty elite position and doesn’t really look at the social purpose and reciprocity in a community building sense, but in fairness to Grant, this was not his objective and this book is from the early 2010s.

The entire perspective resonates strongly with me and with the principles that I have always sought to follow on a personal level in business, but I particularly liked the approach to finding the mutuality of value that arises through creating a giving culture in our increasingly networked lives.

100% worth a read.