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 future.
*
As networking guru Keith
Ferrazzi summarizes in
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