Monday Oct 27, 2025
Monday Oct 27, 2025
Monday, 24 November 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Adam Grant |
, he was a record-setting advertising director at Let’s Go Publications, an All-American springboard diver, and a professional magician.
Adam’s seminal contribution, ‘Give and Take,’ is a New York Times bestseller translated into 27 languages. He has been profiled on the Today Show and in the New York Times magazine cover story, ‘Is giving the secret to getting ahead?’
Adam’s speaking and consulting clients include Google, Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the US Army and Navy. He got his permanency as an academic while still in his twenties, and has been honoured with the Excellence in Teaching Award for every class that he has taught.
Adam earned his Ph.D. in organisational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing it in less than three years, and his B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude with highest honours and Phi Beta Kappa honours. He has more than 60 publications in leading management and psychology journals, and his pioneering studies have increased performance and reduced burnout among engineers and sales professionals, enhanced call centre productivity, and motivated safety behaviours among doctors, nurses and lifeguards.
Adam on give and take
It was interesting to see an interview given by Adam Grant to the Mind Matters Editor Gareth Cook. We all know what successful people look like. They are the ones who do whatever it takes, the ones with the sharp elbows, the ones who know how to take what is theirs. But there is a different, better path to success, argues Adam Grant, in ‘Give and Take’.
Cook asked from Adam as to how Americans tend to think about the personality of successful people, and what first led him to suspect that this may be wrong.
“Many of us assume that to achieve success, it’s necessary to get at least as much from other people as we contribute to them. If we’re too generous, others will take advantage of us, and we’ll end up running out of time and energy to work toward our own goals. I first started questioning this assumption when I was a senior in high school. I had just applied to Harvard, and I was assigned to an interview with a lawyer named John Gierak. He was extremely successful, with many awards and an impressive track record of representing influential clients.
“My interview was scheduled to be 30 minutes, but John spent several hours with me, going far above and beyond the call of duty to learn about my values and passions. It was clear that he was genuinely concerned about helping every applicant put his or her best foot forward. I walked away with a clear sense that he had been operating this way all his life, and that it was part of what made him such a trustworthy colleague and committed advocate for clients. Later, this experience and many others like it led me to wonder whether we had it backward when we thought about the link between success and giving. Most of us assume that people achieve success and then start giving back. But what if the opposite is true? Could it be that giving first actually leads people to succeed later?”
“In one of my own studies, hundreds of salespeople completed a questionnaire on their commitment to helping co-workers and customers,” continues Grant. “I tracked their sales revenue over the course of a year. I found that the most productive salespeople were the ‘givers’ – those who reported the strongest concern for benefiting others from the very beginning of their jobs. They earned the trust of their customers and the support of their co-workers. Similar patterns emerged in a number of other fields, and before long, I had many data points showing that the most successful people in a wide range of jobs are those who focus on contributing to others. The givers often outperform the matchers – those who seek an equal balance of giving and getting – as well as the takers, who aim to get more than they give.”
One may tend to think whether there could be people who give a lot genuinely taken advantage of. Perhaps they might end up exhausted. Adam shares his views on this.
“This is the sharper edge of g
enerosity: I found that the salespeople with the lowest revenue were also passionate about helping co-workers and customers. In fact, across a number of jobs, givers were overrepresented at the top and the bottom of various success metrics. Some of the generous salespeople were exploited by co-workers who stole from their customers, others spent too much time with individual customers to be productive, and many just burned themselves out.
Is being a ‘giver a gamble? How can one guarantee that one will end up being one of the successful givers and not among the legions of the burnt-out? This is how Adam looks at it.
“I see it less as a gamble, and more as a question of strategy. Ultimately, the biggest difference between the givers who rise to the top and those who sink to the bottom is the boundaries that they set. Givers who burn out consistently put the interests of others ahead of their own, sacrificing their energy and time and undermining their ability to give in the long run. Those who maintain success are careful to balance concern for others with their own interests. Instead of helping all of the people all of the time, they help many of the people much of the time. They’re careful to give in ways that are high benefit to others but not exceedingly costly to themselves.”
Reflecting on Sri Lankans
Having read the book and listened to its author, I started thinking on us, Sri Lankans. Are we more givers, takers or matchers? Culturally, Asians had been more like givers, but not anymore. Globalisation has broken cultural barriers. We see a mix of givers, takers and matchers in Sri Lankan society. We are witnessing an interesting time with political somersaults, aptly showcasing givers, takers and matchers. My take is simple. A giver never regrets. I am so happy to be in a profession that demands to be so.
(Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri is the Acting Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Management. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Division of Management and Entrepreneurship,
Price College of Business, University of Oklahoma, USA.)
