In the final chapters of Give and Take, Adam Grant pulls together all the examples he’s given and briefly turns his attention to being otherish in business.
“In the mind of a giver,” he explains, “the definition of success itself takes on a distinctive meaning. Whereas takers view success as attaining results that are superior to each others’ and matchers see success in terms of balancing individual accomplishments with fairness to others, givers are inclined to . . . characteriz[e] success as individual achievements that have a positive impact on others.”
There’s not much question which approach Adam thinks is the most powerful, and his book has plenty of evidence that he’s right. Having set the stage with his new, otherish definition of success, Adam then crisply expresses the fundamental idea of this blog. He says: “[t]aking this definition of success seriously might require dramatic changes in the way that organizations hire, evaluate, reward, and promote people. It would mean paying attention not only to the productivity of individual people but also to the ripple effects of this productivity on others.”
Adam’s not the first person to have expressed this idea. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, which was published in 1922, Henry Ford said, “It is the function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or speculation. Producing for consumption implies that the quality of the article produced will be high and that the price will be low—that the article be one which serves the people and not merely the producer.”
Henry Ford understood the principle that business could thrive by serving the interests of its employees and customers. At a time when cars regularly sold for nearly $1,000, he slashed the price of his cars to less than $350 and doubled the wages of most of his employees. By the time he died in 1947, his net worth was estimated to be almost $200 billion in today’s dollars.
There’s no question that Henry Ford succeeded because he produced a high-quality product and marketed it well. But he also paid his employees twice what the market told him he had to and gave them back nearly 20% of their work week. In other words, he succeeded by being otherish.
Adam Grant says that by “shifting ever so slightly in the giver direction, we might find our waking hours [at work] marked by greater success, richer meaning, and more lasting impact.” Henry Ford said, “Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end.”
I think they’re right, and I’m out to prove it.
