Free B00AFPTSI0 EBOK by Adam M. Grant Ph.D. Page A

one another learn and succeed. “I get roped into giving free advice to other entrepreneurs, which is usually worth less than they pay for it,” he muses, but “helping others is my favorite thing to do.”
    This approach has led to great things—not just for Rifkin, but also for those he’s shepherded along the way. In 2001, Rifkin was a big fan of Blogger, an early blog publishing service. Blogger had run out of funding, so Rifkin offered a contract to Blogger’s founder to do some work for his own first start-up, KnowNow. “We decided to hire him because we wanted to see Blogger survive,” Rifkin says. “We gave him a contract to build something for our company so we could use it as a demo and he could keep Blogger going.” The money from the contract helped the founder keep Blogger afloat, and he went on to cofound a company called Twitter. “There were several other people who also contracted with Evan Williams so he could keep his company going,” Rifkin reflects. “You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”
    In the search for
Fortune
’s
best networker, when Rifkin popped up as the winner, the reporter on the story, Jessica Shambora, laughed out loud. “Not surprisingly, I had already met him! Someone had referred me to him for a story I was researching on virtual goods and social networks.” Shambora, who now works at Facebook, says that Rifkin is “the consummate networker, and he didn’t get that way by being some sort of climber, or calculated. People go to Adam because they know his heart is in the right place.” When he first moved up to Silicon Valley, Rifkin felt that giving was a natural way to come out of his shell. “As a very shy, sheltered computer guy, the concept of the network was my north star,” he says. “When you have nothing, what’s the first thing you try to do? You try to make a connection and have a relationship that gives you an opportunity to do something for someone else.”
    On Rifkin’s LinkedIn page, his motto is “I want to improve the world, and I want to smell good while doing it.” As of September 2012, on LinkedIn, 49 people have written recommendations for Rifkin, and no attribute is mentioned more frequently than his giving. A matcher would write recommendations back for the same 49 people, and perhaps sprinkle in a few unsolicited recommendations for key contacts, in the hopes that they’ll reciprocate. But Rifkin gives more than five times as much as he gets: on LinkedIn, he has written detailed recommendations for 265 different people. “Adam is off the charts in how much he helps,” says the entrepreneur Raymond Rouf. “He gives a lot more than he receives. It’s part of his mantra to be helpful.”
    Rifkin’s networking style, which exemplifies how givers tend to approach networks, stands in stark contrast to the way that takers and matchers tend to build and extract value from their connections. The fact that Rifkin gives a lot more than he receives is a key point: takers and matchers also give in the context of networks, but they tend to give strategically, with an expected personal return that exceeds or equals their contributions. When takers and matchers network, they tend to focus on who can help them in the near future, and this dictates what, where, and how they give. Their actions tend to exploit a common practice in nearly all societies around the world, in which people typically subscribe to a norm of reciprocity : you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you help me, I’m indebted to you, and I feel obligated to repay. According to the psychologist Robert Cialdini, people can capitalize on this norm of reciprocity by giving what they want to receive. Instead of just reactively doing favors for the people who have already helped them, takers and matchers often proactively offer favors to people whose help they want in the