My name is Alana Weiss, and today it is my pleasure to

welcome Adam Grant to the Leading at Google series.

Adam Grant is the youngest tenured professor and single

highest rated teacher at the Wharton School.

He is a former record setting advertising director, junior

Olympic springboard diver, and professional magician.

He has been honored as one of "Business Week's" favorite

professors and one of the world's top 40 business

professors under 40.

Adam is a regular contributor to Google's People &

Innovation lab, and he also has consulted with clients

ranging from the NFL to Goldman Sachs

to the United Nations.

He holds a Ph.D in organizational psychology from

the University of Michigan and a BA from Harvard University.

Today, Adam will share from his new book "Give and Take."

Please join me in welcoming Adam Grant.

[APPLAUSE]

ADAM GRANT: Good morning.

Thank you guys so much for having me.

I'm truly delighted to be here.

It's always an honor and a treat to speak to Googlers,

and also to see lots of friendly

faces in the audience.

And I'm going to try to turn all of those friendly faces in

a more negative direction in the next few minutes.

The place I want to start is I want to talk for maybe 35 or

40 minutes or so.

We'll have lots of interactive discussion throughout, and

then hopefully open it up then for some questions and more

discussion.

But the place to begin, really, is to say that I'm

interested in success and what makes some people and

organizations incredibly productive and effective and

why other people, perhaps, are less so.

And at the end of the day, what I want to know is how can

every person in this room own a face that looks like this?

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ADAM GRANT: And I know some of you are thinking right now,

well, I already own that face.

And the question is, well, how could you own it more often?

Or how could you spread it to the other people around you?

And as an organizational psychologist, when I started

doing research in this area about 10 years ago, I found

that there were three ways to get to this face--

hard work, talent, and luck.

If you want to be effective in any domain or any profession

or any field, you have to develop a strong work ethic,

you have to really be mastery or expertise oriented so that

you develop true skills, and, as Malcolm Gladwell told us in

"Outliers," you have to find yourself in the right place at

the right time.

And I think that's all true.

But for me, it was missing a really important part of

success in this connected world that we all live in--

our interactions with others.

Most of you work in teams.

Many of you have clients.

Some of you have more managers than you would like, perhaps.

And the question is, how does the way that you interact with

those people every day, shape the results that you achieve,

the promotions that you gain?

And ultimately, perhaps also the meaning in the happiness

that you obtain.

So when I was trying to get to the bottom of this, I came

across a really inspiring quote.

It was from Robert Benchley.

And Benchley said there are only two kinds of people in

the world--

those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and

those who don't.

And I thought that was a really profound way of

criticizing those of us in the psychology world who like to

oversimplify all of the richness and complexity of

human beings.

And I told myself that if I ever wrote a book I would

never dumb down all of the complexity of people into just

two categories.

Which is why today I am proud to announce to you that if you

want to capture everything important about interpersonal

interaction in organizations you need not two, but three

categories.

No, actually, in all seriousness, there's a good

amount of evidence across industries and across cultures

that there are three fundamental motives that

people bring to their interactions.

I call them reciprocity styles, basically trying to

capture the way that you approach your interactions

with other people into exchanging value.

On one end of the reciprocity spectrum we have the takers.

The people that we all love to hate who try to get as much as

possible from others and try to shirk having to contribute

back and often specialize in things like relentless self

promotion, hogging credit, and maybe stepping on a few people

on their way to the top.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum we have these very,

very strange characters that I call givers.

And for some odd reason, they actually enjoy helping others.

Not necessarily philanthropists or volunteers,

but rather the kinds of people who do a lot of knowledge

sharing, who are always introducing people and making

connections, who may step up to provide mentoring.

Now, very few of us fall purely in the

taker or giver category.

Most people, it turns out, if you look at the data, are what

I call matchers.

And a matcher is somebody who has tried to keep an even

balance of give and take.

Quid pro quo.

Tit for tat.

If I do you a favor, I expect you to do me one in return.

And that seems like a safe and reasonable way to live your

professional life.

But my question is, is it the best way to live your

professional life?

Is being a matcher, which most people choose to do, actually

the best path to success?

I'm going to try to shed some light on that today.

But before we do that, let's dive into the takers a little

bit and say, how would you recognize a taker even if you

didn't know that person?

So I prepared a little test, first of all, for you to

figure out if you yourself are a taker.

If you could take a moment and take the test, I'll tell you

whether you passed.

AUDIENCE: [CHUCKLING]

ADAM GRANT: Now, I hope this is the only thing I will say

today that is not based on data or evidence.

But I sincerely believe that the longer it takes you to

laugh, the worse your score is on the taker spectrum.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ADAM GRANT: Obviously, there are a couple different paths

to becoming a taker.

One is to be a narcissistic, to be insecure, to believe

that you have to be superior to others to be successful and

carry around this assumption that the world is zero sum.

A second path to becoming a taker, which I want to talk a

little bit about today, is having been taken advantage of

one too many times as a matcher or a giver, and

believing if I don't put myself first in this

dog-eat-dog competitive world, nobody will.

There's a third path to becoming a taker which I'm not

going to talk about today, it's called being a

psychopath.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ADAM GRANT: So all right.

How do you spot a taker?

How do you recognize one?

There's an actual study by Chatterjee and Hambrick

showing that you can tell whether a CEO is a taker just

by looking at that person's photograph in a company's

annual report.

Here are photos of two CEOs.

I would argue that one is a taker, one's a giver.

These guys both built very successful companies.

Both, interestingly, in the 1970s worked in the Nixon

administration, which I believe is where one learned

some of his taking habits.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ADAM GRANT: And the question is--

these photos were taken right from their annual reports--

can you tell which of the two of them is the taker just by

looking at their faces or their clothing?

Take a second to study them, and then I'm going to ask you

to weigh in with your votes, and then justify your bets.

[WHISTLING "JEOPARDY!" THEME]

So as of 2013, most Wharton undergrads don't recognize

that music.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ADAM GRANT: Which I find to be a great tragedy.

Like, is that "The Twilight Zone?" No.