Praise for adam grant’s give and Take
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| Chicago Tribune
headline read “Apologetic Bulls ‘Stuck’ with Jordan.” The general manager of the Bulls, Rod Thorn, seemed disappointed. “We wish he were 7 feet, but he isn’t,” Thorn lamented. “There just wasn’t a center available. What can you do? Jordan isn’t going to turn this franchise around . . . He’s a very good offensive player, but not an overpowering offensive player.” Even Jordan seemed to endorse the Bowie selection: “Bowie fits in better than I would,” he said during his rookie year, as Portland had “an overabundance of big guards and small forwards.” Perhaps the best defense of Inman’s choice was offered by Ray Patterson, who ran the Houston Rockets in 1984, having selected Hakeem Olajuwon first in that draft before Bowie and Jordan: “Anybody who says they’d have taken Jordan over Bowie is whistling in the dark. Jordan just wasn’t that good.” * Interestingly, Jordan’s basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, the legendary Dean Smith , had more of a giver style. Against his own interests, and strong resistance from his assistants, Smith advised Jordan to enter the NBA draft early, before his senior year. Smith had a rule: “We do what’s best for the player out of season and what’s best for the team in season.” As NBA salaries skyrocketed, Smith encouraged every player who had a good shot at being picked in the top five or ten to leave college early and secure his financial future, as long as he promised to come back and finish his education later. In his thirty-six years as head coach, Smith sent nine athletes to the draft early, and seven made good on their promises. Although Smith was encouraging his best players to leave the team, putting his players’ interests first seemed to help him recruit top talent and build trust and loyalty. Smith retired with 879 wins, then more than any coach in NCAA history; his teams made eleven Final Fours and won two national championships. As Chris Granger, executive vice president at the NBA, explains, “ Talented people are attracted to those who care about them . When you help someone get promoted out of your team, it’s a short-term loss, but it’s a clear long-term gain. It’s easier to attract people, because word gets around that your philosophy is to help people.” * It’s worth noting that the pratfall effect depends on the audience’s self-esteem. Powerless communication humanizes the communicator, so it should be most appealing to audiences who see themselves as human: those with average self-esteem. Indeed, Aronson and colleagues found that when competent people make blunders, audiences with average self-esteem respond more favorably than audiences with high and low self-esteem. * The same pattern showed up in another study, where more than six hundred salespeople responsible for women’s products completed a questionnaire that revealed whether they were givers: did they try to offer the product that was best suited to customers’ needs? When researchers tracked their sales revenue, the givers initially had no advantage. As they came to understand their customers, the givers pulled further and further ahead. By the third and fourth quarters, the givers were bringing in significantly more revenue. The givers gathered more information about customers’ needs and were more flexible in how they responded to customers. |