There’s a great book that goes over this by Wharton Professor Adam Grant called Give and Take

Pretty popular and not a niche book, but I enjoyed Give and Take by Adam Grant very much [0].

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-give-and-take/

Pretty popular and not a niche book, but I enjoyed Give and Take by Adam Grant very much [0].

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-give-and-take/

Funny you should say this. The author Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and has a book called "Give and Take" that talks about a lot of this. And unlike most business books, it's all backed up with well researched data.

I just finished his book Give and Take. It was a great read.

This is Adam Grant, who wrote a book about relationships ("Give and Take") and admitted in it that his own relationship with his wife was sometimes rocky because he worked too much?

Related to this I'd recommend Adam Grant's Bestseller Give and Take. The surprising conclusion is while some "Givers" end up at the bottom, other "Givers" also end up at the top. The key to doing good and doing well is to practice what he calls "generous tit for tat".

Key graf:

“One of the best things you can do is call someone else facing a similar problem and talk them through it. When you talk other people through their problems, you come up with wiser perspectives and solutions for yourself.”
Adam Grant, author of "Give and Take"

> what's the most valuable question one could ever ask?

"How can I best help you?" Asked with the sincere intention to be of some assistance.

Incidentally, great book recommendation, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158498-give-and-take

Adam Grant's Give and Take is a good layman application of game theory to interpersonal relationships. Tit for tat would be called the 'matchers'

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

Ask GaryVee by Gary Vaynerchuk

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Give and Take by Adam Grant

Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg

You should read "Give and Take" by Adam Grant. It clearly shows all the benefits of being a Giver rather than a Taker. I've written down my learnings [0], since I really enjoyed reading it.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-give-and-take/

This article's top line is really good advice. But, with respect, the author is overthinking it just a little.

When somebody helps me out, I say to their manager, "when you get a chance please tell them I'm grateful for their good work."

Was it their distinguished expertise that made it possible for them to help me? Was it a spirit of collegiality? From my perspective, I don't care when I thank them. They did me a favor, I'm happy, I'm grateful.

Give and Take is a book by Adam Grant on this part of the workplace. https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutiona...

I do want to point out in addition to Bob Sutton's research, there's Adam Grant's research he writes about in "Give and Take." One of the main takeaways, yes there are a LOT of jerks at the top, and nice people at the bottom, but there are some really pretty amazingly nice people at the top as well, and a large portion of the book is citing studies as to why certain nice people are doormats, and certain nice people can make it past all the "takers." Bob Sutton and Adam Grant's work complement each other nicely.

Adam Grant's book Give and Take suggests that altruists acting over prolonged time periods bring not merely superior but optimal rewards to themselves and their group. Group selection may also be involved but hard science now strongly suggests that altruism brings great benefit to individuals when the full situation is taken into account.

Among other books, I read this year Give and Take [0], Flow and Deep Work [1]. I tend to summarize the books I enjoyed the most, to internalize them myself, but also to give others access to it. Maybe you find them interesting (if you haven't already read them). My whole reading list can be found on Goodreads [2] for more inspiration :)

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-give-and-take/

- [1] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-deep-work-flow/

- [2] https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/63553187-robin-wieruch...

iyn,

Author here. Thanks! That's a great suggestion. As you can tell, right now the site and the mailing list is the most minimal of an implementation. We want to build a network, connect and mentor one another through the simplest and easiest mechanism possible - email. Once we have a medium-sized community with dozens of experts, we plan to add community managed content. Perhaps through a wiki?

I'll share the books and articles that have positively affected my career. These aren't tried and true and maybe dozens of people would disagree about their value but here they are, for what they are worth:

Management:

  - High output management (Grove, 1995)
  - Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem)
  - It’s your Ship  (Abrashoff)
  - The score takes care of itself  (Walsh)
  - The Hard Thing About Hard Things  (Horowitz)
  - Where good ideas come from  (Johnson)
  - Extreme Ownership (Navy Seals) — (Willink)
  - Work Rules — (Bock)
  - 5 Dysfunctions of a team — (Lencioni)
  - Give and Take (Grant)
  - This is what impactful Engineering leadership looks like - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-what-impactful-engineering-leadership-looks-like/
  - Notes on startup engineering management for young bloods - http://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html?m=1

Engineering:

  - Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Duval, Matyas, Glover, 2007)
  - Continuous Delivery: Release Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment Automation (Humble, Farley, 2010)
  - Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) (Beck, Andres)
  - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  - Refactoring Databases - Evolutionary Database Design (Ambler, Sadalage, 2006)

There's a psychology book that researches this phenomena. I forgot the title but it starts out by saying people in general can be grouped into three categories. Givers, exchangers and takers. Givers tend to care about people, takers tend to care about themselves and exchangers try to be fair.

I don't know all the quantitative and qualitative parameters used for the study but they found out that in general the types of people who were least successful (in companies and other structured organizations) were the givers. The surprising result was that the most successful people were also givers while takers and exchangers generally hovered in the center. You'd have to read it to know more.

Unlikely you'll ever read the book but I just recalled the name, it's called Give and Take for anyone interested.

Hi Phillip! Just want to say I'm so sorry to hear about your heart attack. Yet I am so glad that you are well and back up on your feet again!! I really admire your willing to provide the service for the company so readily! It reminds me of a book I'm currently reading, and I'm sure it will bless you a ton!!

The book is called: "Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success".

Phillip, Looking back to 2013-2014, I was wondering what would you have done differently both on the product and also for yourself?

Exactly like you, I am wondering how to go 'faster' and 'faster' in how we build things, test things, and know our users.

The article makes no attempt to establish that concern for others' interests is not necessarily mutually exclusive to self-interest.

In his book Give and Take, Adam Grant talks about givers who are "otherish:" they demonstrate strong compassion for others, but not at the neglect of self-interest. Those who identified as otherish were least susceptible to burnout or compassion fatigue and could sustain their patterns for giving more help than they received for long periods of time.

I suspect there is some correlation between high concern for the interests of others and low prioritization of self-interest. But the real culprit is low self-interest, not high empathy or a strong concern for fairness.

This reminds me of the lessons in Give and Take by Adam Grant. There is almost a Zen aspect of sincere networking. The more your end goal is to simply network with others and increase your network the less sincere you are likely to operate. However if you go to an event or gathering with a genuine curiosity and freely listen to others with no expectation of return and develop an ability to actually care (in that moment, at least, but really more deeply) your network will easily grow. Events and conversations have often led to cool places when I have interacted with others with no expectation of return.

Grant would just say you are acting as a Giver in the social context. This is very powerful and people react to it. A lot of people get good at purposefully faking being a Giver, precisely because your sole intention is to manipulate with forethought about how you can come out ahead (take) or at least come out equal to others in a social setting. Pure takers are honestly a little creepy because it shows a rather high level of self focus that (in my experience) tends to make someone a negative.

Give and Take by Adam Grant - even after a few years, it still causes me to constantly reflect on my own actions’ motive and if they’re “otherish” or not.

Getting Things Done - not the method but the insight that you can’t manage time, only your actions. And that it’s OK not do to anything without having to make excuses to yourself.

The 2nd and 3rd Ender novels - Ramen and Varelse are concepts that apply to vega/veganism from a completely different angle. It’s not an intended metaphor I think, but it applies to my life on a personal leve; (I’m not vegan, my wife is).

I read about a book a week this year, and the one that I loved most was "Give and Take" by Adam Grant. The book discusses two opposite approaches to work and life: being a taker (where you always try to use people and situations to your advantage) and being a giver (where you try to help others out before yourself). The book included a nice combination of anecdotes and research that all pointed to giving being a more effective road to success than taking. The first half of the book is spent building a compelling case for the main thesis (i.e. that giving is better); the second half talks about a few pitfalls that should be avoided and offers tips on how to be a more effective giver. Some of the lessons that I learned included tips for learning when I'm being taken advantage of and tips on how to keep from burning out on generosity.

I loved the combination of research + practical applicability and I think the book encapsulates many parts of the startup/tech community where people will help others -- even strangers -- very generously. I've given (no pun intended) about half a dozen copies of this book as gifts to friends.

So I’ve been working remotely for the past 3 years and whenever I search for things like “tips for managing virtual teams” or “flexible workforce tips”, I get back super vague listicles with advice like “hire well”, or “engage often”. While true, I’ve always found the results incredibly unhelpful.

This made me want to create a “deeper” article about some of the psychology that I think influences remote teams, along with some thoughts around what leaders can do to combat some of the pitfalls.

I decided to combine my viewpoints with three of my favourite books: Give and Take, Algorithms to Live By, and the Four Tendencies.

I’m interested to hear what other remote workers think. Does remote work influence the give/take balance? Do we need to be more intentional about how we’re designing remote systems? Do you think we can learn anything from the four tendencies data?

PS: If anyone has links to articles that dig deep into the psychology of remote work, I’d love to read them.

Anyone interested in reading more on this topic should check out Adam Grant's Give and Take.

Incidentally, one of the interesting takeaways from the book is that if you look at plot of people mapped to career success, you'll find that benevolent givers dominate -both- ends of the distribution. The theory goes that those who are in the left tail got there by being too preoccupied with others' needs, to the exclusion of their own success. Conversely those in the right tail got to where they are both by helping others and by consistently asking others to help them. In the latter scenario these folks have harnessed benevolence as a strategy for career growth, and the collective goodwill "out there in the ether" nets out to measurable success over the long-run.